{"id":6875,"date":"2015-10-23T19:51:32","date_gmt":"2015-10-23T18:51:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/?p=6875"},"modified":"2022-08-06T23:55:50","modified_gmt":"2022-08-06T21:55:50","slug":"the-real-challenge-when-learning-characters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hackingchinese.com\/the-real-challenge-when-learning-characters\/","title":{"rendered":"The real challenge with learning Chinese characters"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"invgraph3\"<\/a>When talking about learning Chinese characters with people who haven’t learnt Chinese yet, there are two kinds of reactions.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Is it hard to learn 3500 Chinese characters?<\/h3>\n

Most people seem to think Chinese is next to impossible to learn because you need at least 3500 characters to be literate (or 2500 or 4500 or whatever). Of course, you also need to know words and grammar, but let’s leave that out of the equation for now.<\/p>\n

A few people react the opposite way,t though, which is more interesting. Learning 3500\u00a0facts is not really that difficult if you’re dedicated and take a year or so to do it. That’s about ten per day for a year, which isn’t unreasonable! It could even be done much faster if you spent more time.<\/p>\n

In this article, I will look at both these approaches, which will lead us to what I believe is the real problem when learning characters. Becoming literate in Chinese is definitely not impossible, but learning 3500 characters is much harder than learning a similar number of facts in many other disciplines, such as the natural sciences.<\/p>\n

Early-stage character learning<\/h3>\n

When you start learning characters, it feels more like drawing than writing.\u00a0The difference is profound, however. If you write, you use certain written symbols to convey meaning according to a clearly defined convention (a written language), but when you draw, even if you convey meaning in some way, the conventions are much loser and less strictly defined.<\/p>\n

To move from drawing to writing, you have to learn the conventions and rules of the language. This takes time.<\/p>\n

Therefore, for beginners, the main problem is to commit characters to memory, to remember how they are written, what they mean and how they are pronounced. This is something you get better at the more you do it.<\/p>\n

It’s also an area where lots of hacking is possible, which means that if you can break the code, you can learn how to learn characters quickly (for example, figuring out how phonetic components work<\/a>).<\/p>\n

When you have reached such a pre-intermediate stage in Chinese, or when you’ve learnt how to remember things in general, you might think that learning a few thousand more characters won’t be that difficult.<\/p>\n

And you’d be right. Learning the characters isn’t the real challenge.<\/p>\n

The real challenge with learning Chinese characters<\/h3>\n

Before I continue, I’d like to say that learning 3500 facts of any kind is not trivial, so if you think it’s hard, don’t feel discouraged. Instead, read this article: Remembering is a skill you can learn<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What I want to talk about next is that the real, long-term problem with learning Chinese characters isn’t committing new characters to memory.<\/p>\n

Instead, the real problem includes:<\/p>\n