My best advice on how to learn Chinese characters

How to learn Chinese charactersLearning Chinese characters is not easy, especially if you use the
wrong method.

Even with the right method, it’s a task that requires time and perseverance.

In this article, I summarise the best advice I have on how to learn Chinese characters, based on more
than ten years of learning, teaching and writing about Chinese.

My best advice on how to learn Chinese characters

I have much to say when it comes to learning Chinese characters, not only because it’s a complex task in
itself, but also because it’s handled badly in many classrooms. I have already written about most of these
topics before and my goal in this article is to summarise the most important advice.

That means that I will adress most questions you might have about learning Chinese characters, but that
I can’t put all the details in this article because it would turn it into a book. Instead, I will provide links to
further reading for those who want more.

Note: There is a lot of information here. You’re not meant to read through everything from start to finish,
but rather find the answers to the questions you have about learning Chinese characters.

To make it easier for you to find what you’re looking for, here’s an overview of the content in this article.
If you’re looking for something in particular, just searching on this page works too!

Understanding Chinese characters and the Chinese writing system

Understanding the Chinese writing system

Chinese words, characters, components and strokes

Finding information about Chinese characters

Variation in Chinese characters

Learning to read and write Chinese characters

Which Chinese characters and words should you learn?

How to learn Chinese characters

Things you can safely ignore when learning Chinese characters

More about writing Chinese characters by hand

Reviewing and remembering Chinese characters

How to not forget the Chinese characters you’ve learnt

Mnemonics and improving your memory

Practical considerations: Where and how to review

Beyond beginner: Character learning in the long term

Before we get started though, it’s worth discussing when you should learn Chinese characters. I assume
that you’re not only interested in the spoken language (I doubt you’d be reading this article if you were).

The short answer is that it makes sense to focus on the spoken language first, thus delaying learning
characters. Learning characters becomes easier the more Chinese you know, but learning the sounds of
the spoken language actually becomes harder the longer you wait. Read more about this in: Should you
learn to speak Chinese before you learn Chinese characters?

1. Understanding Chinese characters and the Chinese writing system

In part one, we’ll look at how to make sense of the Chinese writing system and understand how
characters work. Understanding is important, because if research into learning tells us anything, it is that
learning things that don’t mean anything is hard. The worst case scenario is regarding characters as a
jumble of disconnected strokes and try to learn them through mindless repetition.

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1.1 Understanding the Chinese writing system

Chinese characters started out as pictures representing objects, such as trees (木), doors (门/門),
the sun (日) and the moon (月). However, drawing pictures of everything we want to
write is not very practical and some things are hard to draw.

One way of getting around this is to modify characters we already have, such as
adding a mark to “tree” (木) to form either “root” (本) or “end; tip” (末).

Next, we can take characters we already have and combine them into new characters.
For example, we can combine two bright objects “sun” (日) and “moon” (日) to form
a new character meaning “bright” (明).

It’s worth remembering that spoken language comes before written language, so when
characters were invented, people were writing down things they already knew how to
say.

So, if we in the spoken language use the word men to indicate plural for pronouns
(such as turning wǒ, “I” (我,), into wǒmen, “us” (我们/們)), we can use an already
existing character that is pronounced like that, such as mén, “door” (门/門). To
show that we mean the plural marker and not door, we add a variant of the person for
“person” (人, written ⺅here) and we get men 们/們.

Naturally, this is a simplification and the real historical process is often very
complicated, but it gives you the bare minimum you need to make full use of the
following advice:

Think of Chinese characters in terms of functional components – Most characters are

composed of smaller components that are there for a reason (even if that reason is
sometimes lost in the mists of time). By paying attention to the function of each
component, you can understand how the character works.

Phonetic components in Chinese charactersLearn about and understand how phonetic

components can help you understand characters – A large majority of Chinese
characters are combinations of one sound component and one meaning component (just
like 们/們 in my example above). These are usually called phonetic-semantic compounds
and without learning about them, you haven’t even begun to understand Chinese
characters. In the follow-up to this article, I talk about how to make maximum use of
this when learning characters.

5 levels of understanding Chinese characters: Superficial forms to deep structure –

As you have probably realised by now, there’s a lot to learn here, much more than
anyone can hope to learn in a lifetime. But how much understanding do you need?
Generally, speaking, you need enough to understand how functional components fit
together to form characters. Stay away from methods that actively hide the
composition of characters, but most people don’t need to go all-in and learn the
real history behind every single character. If you think something is not useful for
remembering the character, then ignore it!

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1.2 Chinese words, characters, components and strokes

Now that we know that Chinese characters are composed of functional components, the
next question is how to navigate this multi-layered web. The fact that it is a web is
very helpful, though, because learning a few hundred building blocks and how they fit
together is much easier than learning thousands of unique symbols.

Here’s my best advice regarding components, characters and words in Chinese:

Focusing on radicals, character components and building blocks – Learning

characters, it’s important to balance top-down and bottom-up processes. The first
refers to starting with the whole, like a word or a sentence, then breaking it down
into its component parts, trying to understand them. The second, bottom-up, starts
with the components and builds up to the whole. Both approaches have their pros and
cons, and you can use both in parallel.

Learn the building blocks of Chinese characters – By learning the components that
act as building blocks in Chinese characters, you can vastly accelerate your
learning. They provide meaningful hooks you can use to remember characters, and when
you’ve learnt enough components, learning more characters is reduced to the a matter
of combining things you already know.

Learn individual characters to boost vocabulary acquisition – Chinese is written

with words, and most words, but far from all, consists of more than one character.
Still, learning individual characters is a good idea because they make it a lot
easier to learn words. Knowing individual characters also allows you to guess the
meaning of words they appear in! Learn the basic meaning, not all possible meanings
the character can have.

Learn words and the characters they consist of – Learning words is what we’re truly
after, as those are what enables us to read and write. While characters often fit
together rather logically to form words, you won’t get very far with single
characters. Naturally, in the real world, you will almost always stumble on words you
need to learn and then break them down when necessary. Knowing many words is
incredibly important for many reasons.

Grammar allows you to make sense of sentences – While this is beyond the scope of
this article as it’s not about characters, the next step is to learn grammar to
allow you to parse sentences and construct your own. In my opinion, this is best
learnt with a lot of reading and listening, combined with some direct studying of
grammar rules when necessary.

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1.3 Finding information about Chinese characters

As we have seen, vocabulary in Chinese is a multi-layered web and there’s much

information you need to be able to look up when needed, although you should try to
use learning methods and materials that limit the number of new characters. Here’s
the best advice I have to offer about how to look up information about Chinese
characters:

How to look up Chinese characters you don’t know – Looking up characters in a

dictionary used to be quite difficult; I have even taken a course in how to use a
dictionary! Fortunately, you don’t have to do that, because there are now digital
dictionaries that work very well. In this article, I go through many different ways
of looking up characters, including by writing on screen, by scanning text (OCR), by
searching in Pinyin and by using radicals.

Looking up how to use words in Chinese the right way – Even advanced students are
sometimes not very good at using dictionaries. Unlike when learning a language
closely related to English, using a dictionary to find a word you want to say or
write in Chinese is not as easy. Translating on a word level almost never works and
you need to pay attention to context. This article teaches you the basics in how to
use a dictionary for speaking and writing purposes.

21 essential dictionaries and corpora for learning Chinese – There are a ton of
dictionaries available for learning Chinese, but which should you use? It depends on
what you want to use it for, but Pleco or Hanping is a good start, and both contain
many extra dictionary-add-ons. When it comes to web-based dictionaries, Youdao is my
favourite. If this is not enough, this article goes into much more detail about
various dictionaries and corpora (word banks).

The Outlier Linguistics Dictionary of Chinese Characters – I want to give this

dictionary a special mention because it’s the best way for students to access up-to-
date information about Chinese character etymology. The link goes to my in-depth
review of the dictionary, which I think is a must for students and teachers who are
interested in learning more about how Chinese characters work. It’s a one-time
purchase that will be useful for as long as you learn characters.

Apart from looking up characters in general,you also need resources to move up and
down the knowledge web, either zooming in to look at the building blocks or zooming
out to put the character in context. Some of these resources overlap with those
mentioned above, but this is a different way of sorting them and is quite useful if
you need to zoom!

Zooming in: The tools you need to break down and understand Chinese characters – In
order to learn efficiently, it’s important that you integrate your knowledge. This
means being able to break down words into characters, and characters into components.
This first article goes through the tools and resources you need to do so.

Zooming out: The resources you need to put Chinese in context – In this second
article, we look at tools for zooming out and putting things in context. This is an
incredibly important step, especially since Chinese is very distant from English, and
characters and words really need to be studied in context.

Panning: How to keep similar Chinese characters and words separate – In the third
article, we look at how to pan, or in other words, how to learn about how components,
characters and words relate to each other on the same level. This is necessary to
keep similar components, characters and words apart, but a word of warning: don’t
try to learn many similar things at once; it will make it easier to mix them up.
Instead, only pan when you have a problem you need to sort out (more about this
later).

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1.4 Variation in Chinese characters

As if learning thousands of characters weren’t enough, there’s also a lot of

variation going on, such as that between handwriting and computer fonts, simplified
and traditional characters, or just some character variants that look different in
different contexts. Here’s my best advice regarding how to deal with these problems
and find the information you need:
Learning simplified and traditional Chinese – Contrary to what you might have heard,
the differences between simplified and traditional Chinese are not that big. Which
set you start with depends largely on practical considerations: most people learn
simplified, but learn traditional if you have special interest in Taiwan or Hong
Kong. Learning both sets is not hard once you’ve learnt one of them.

Are simplified characters really simpler to learn? Given that one character set is
simplified and was standardised with the explicit goal to increase literacy, many
just assume that simplified characters are easier to learn. But are they really?
Fewer strokes does not mean easier to learn, especially not in this modern age of
digital input systems!

Chinese character variants and fonts for language learners – Most students at some
point feel confused and frustrated by the unpredictable way characters are displayed
on phones and computers. By understanding the problem and using the right fonts, you
can make sure you learn to write characters that match the standard you want to
follow.

How to verify that you use the right Chinese font – When I started writing
characters, I accidentally used a Japanese font. Don’t do that. Even using a Chinese
font that doesn’t follow the right standard might cost you points on a test, even if
it’s unlikely to cause people to not understand what you write. This article
contains the fonts you need, as well as a step by step guide for how to check that
your computer or phone is using the right font.

Shape-shifting character components – Pay attention to components that change shape

depending on where they appear in a character. These are not really different
characters, but they can appear so to beginners. Some important examples include 人,
“person”, being written 亻 when it appears on the left in a character, and 火,
“fire”, being written 灬 sometimes when it’s at the bottom. In my list of the most
common radicals, I have included variant forms such as these.

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2. Learning to read and write Chinese characters

In part one, we looked at how to understand the writing system and find the
information you need, but that’s obviously not enough, you also need to learn
characters. This part is about that, starting out with what characters to learn and
how to find them, then moving on to learning characters, some things you can safely
skip, and then finally advice specific to writing by hand, including if this is
actually something you need to learn in a modern, digital age.
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2.1 Which Chinese characters and words should you learn?

This question is difficult to answer since it depends on your learning situation and
how much Chinese you already know. Many formal courses also decide what characters
students should learn, so if you’re enrolled in one of those, you don’t have much
choice in the matter. If you do have a choice, though, here’s my advice for how to
decide what to learn:

Which words you should learn and where to find them – If you’re a beginner, you
need to learn around a hundred characters or so before you can read much of anything.
The easiest way to do this is to rely on materials tailored to beginners in the form
of textbooks. These rarely go through characters properly, but the earlier chapters
in general tend to include the most important vocabulary. If you’re interested in my
own attempt to create the ultimate path to the first 150 characters or so, check out
the character course I built for Skritter. It’s not free, but it also took a long
time to build. If you’re not a complete beginner, you should learn characters by
reading, plus characters you need to be able to communicate about things you care
about.

Should you learn Chinese vocabulary from lists? Generally speaking, no. Learning
vocabulary from a list someone else has created looks like a good deal because it’s
convenient. However, many students reduce learning Chinese to going through word
lists they find online, or otherwise place an unwarranted amount of trust in the
people who created these lists. So my advice from above still stands: most of the
words you learn should come either from reading or from communicative needs.

Vocabulary lists that help you learn Chinese and how to use them – There are
exceptions to the above advice about not relying on lists, though, and this article
goes through several types of lists and discusses how to use them to your advantage.
Lists discussed include: frequency lists, textbook vocabulary lists, proficiency test
lists, special purpose lists and thematic lists.

Kickstart your Chinese character learning with the 100 most common radicals – I’ve
already said that learning the very basics is one of the few cases where relying on
lists makes sense. This lists presents 100 common meaning components in characters,
chosen from the 214 radicals (see the article itself for a discussion about the word
“radical”). You can safely learn all the components on this list because they are
all super useful!

The most common Chinese words, characters and components for language learners and
teachers – If you want to find frequency information for components, characters or
words, this article is for you. It’s a comprehensive overview of the various
resources available, mostly online and freely available. This can be handy if you
want to plug gaps in your vocabulary, or in other words, if you want to check if
you’ve missed very high-frequency words that are significantly below your general
level. Read more about this here: Mapping the terra incognita of Chinese vocabulary.

What important words are missing from HSK? Many people who ignore my advice above
focus a lot on HSK, which is the most wide-spread proficiency test for Chinese. All
lists are flawed, though, and the official test preparation lists that are so popular
actually leave out a lot of words, or delay some very common ones until higher
levels. This is an analysis of what important words are missing from the HSK lists. I
also did the same analysis of the TOCFL lists, which is for the standard proficiency
test used in Taiwan.

Overcoming the problem of having too many Chinese words to learn – All students face
the problem of an ever-increase number of characters and words to learn. There is
obviously no simple solution to this problem as we can’t change the number of words
Chinese people use, and we therefore need to learn, but you can improve your
situation by changing the way you learn words, by learning fewer words, or by adding
them differently in case you’re using flashcards.

The Cthulhu bubble and studying ChineseThe Cthulhu bubble and studying Chinese – In
your studies, you will encounter things that are very complex, don’t make a lot of
sense or sometimes both. I strongly advise that you stay away from these things,
especially as a beginner. You don’t have to sort out complex differences between how
certain characters are used or understand the full process of how a given character
came to be and evolved throughout history. This will contribute very little to your
proficiency for the amount of time you invest. Don’t poke the monsters from beyond
the bubble!

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2.2 How to learn Chinese characters

Now that you have some characters that you want to learn, how do you go about
learning them? Below, I have separated the process into several steps, so this one is
only about the initial learning, but as most of you probably already know,
remembering and reviewing is where the real challenge is at (more about that later):

How to learn Chinese characters as a beginner – When you start learning Chinese,
it’s hard to know where to begin. If you were given a few characters as homework or
just want to learn them for some other reason, how do you go about it? In general,
you want to understand what you’re doing, write the characters a few times to get a
feel for it, but then space out repetitions to make learning more efficient.

Phonetic components in Chinese charactersLearn Chinese character meaning and

pronunciation together – As we saw in part one, most characters look the way they do
because of how they are pronounced. This means that you should learn meaning and
pronunciation together, otherwise it’s unnecessarily hard to learn phonetic series
like 晴, 情, 请, 清 and so on (they all share the phonetic component 青). I’m not a
fan of approaches that ignore sound for this reason.

How to not teach Chinese characters to beginners: A 12-step approach – Even though
it sounds like this article would be about teaching and things you should not do,
it’s actually meant mostly for students and is a guide for what you should do as
well (just reverse the “advice” given). You might be constrained by what your
teacher thinks you ought to do, but if you’re forced to do too many things mentioned
here, you should look for another teacher.

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2.3 Things you can safely ignore when learning Chinese characters

When you start learning Chinese, there are so many things you need to learn, some of
which seem utterly useless. However, you can’t rely on your beginner knowledge to
determine what to learn and what to skip. For example, I will argue later in this
part of the article that stroke order is actually important, which seems odd to many
beginners. Here are some thing you can certainly ignore, though, even if you learn to
write by hand:

Pronunciation of radicalsShould you learn the pronunciation of radicals? This is a

tricky question, because the word “radical” is problematic here. Learning the
pronunciation of components that are used to give the sound in other characters is
very useful (I used the example of 青 above), but most characters you find on a
typical list of radicals are not very common as phonetic components. Thus, the
general answer is “no”, but also that it does depend on the character in question.
Naturally, you need to learn how to pronounce characters that are used on their own!
In my kickstart list mentioned above, I’ve indicated which pronunciations can be
ignored by putting them in brackets.

Should you learn the names of the strokes in Chinese characters? No, not unless your
focus is calligraphy. You will learn the names of the basic strokes later, but
obsessing about what strokes and combinations of strokes are called is a waste of
time. If your teacher writes a lot by hand in class and teaches the strokes naturally
simply by saying them, fine, but I still don’t think that’s a wise use of classroom
time. You do not need to be able to name the strokes in characters you learn, being
able to write them is enough.

How to talk about Chinese characters in Chinese – So if you shouldn’t learn the
pronunciation of all the radicals and shouldn’t learn the stroke names, how do you
talk about Chinese characters in Chinese, then? After all, learning Chinese in
Chinese is a good idea! Well, you gradually learn how native speakers do it and they
certainly do not describe characters stroke by stroke. Instead, they use colloquial
names of components and refer to parts of easier characters. This is not something
you can safely ignore, I just include it here because I want to show how you can talk
about Chinese characters in Chinese without violating the first two pieces of advice
offered in this section!

Should you learn how to categorise characters according to 六书/六書? No, this is
another example of traditional teaching methods that make little sense today. This
system is very old, very complicated and adds very little to your understanding of
characters that functional components don’t do better and in a way that is also
easier to learn. I mention this in How to not teach Chinese characters to beginners:
A 12-step approach mentioned above as well.

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2.4 More about learning to write Chinese characters by hand

Unlike in most other languages, learning to write in Chinese is a separate skill that
requires an awful lot of time to learn. As we have seen above, Chinese characters are
not an alphabet, not even close to it, so they can’t be compared with the Arabic,
Korean or Russian scripts.

While an alphabet can be easily maintained by reading and typing (you can probably
spell almost all words you can type), this is not true in Chinese. It’s perfectly
possible to be able to read well in Chinese and be able to type characters, but have
only limited ability to write by hand. So, is it worth it, should you learn to write
Chinese characters by hand? And if you do, how should you go about it?

Is it necessary to learn to write Chinese characters by hand? – The short answer is

that for most people, no, you don’t need to write by hand very often. Reading and
typing is enough to function in a modern, largely digital society. However, learning
to write can still be useful for beginners in order to deeply process characters and
learn more about them, which will be useful. Learning to write by hand need not be an
all-or-nothing decision either, in fact the best approach is probably to learn to
write the most common characters, but be satisfied with reading and typing for the
rest.

Is it necessary to learn the stroke order of Chinese characters? Yes, you should
learn stroke order. Native speakers write the way they do for a reason: it’s more
practical and efficient. Your characters will look better, it will be easier to make
sense of other people’s handwriting, and using handwriting input will be easier.
Finally, there’s no good alternative to correct stroke order, because making up your
own stroke order creates other problems.

All the resources you need to learn and teach Chinese stroke order – This includes
apps, websites, printable worksheets, where to find information about official
standards for stroke order and so on. Many dictionaries offer stroke order animation
and some apps like Skritter has it built into the very core of the learning process.

How to improve your Chinese handwriting – As argued above, learning to write by hand
is a separate skill in Chinese, and this article takes a closer look at what is
required of you to be able to do it well, along with problems you will encounter
along the way. The process is separated into intent (what you want to write) and
execution (what you actually write). Depending on which you struggle with, the
remedies will be different! I expanded on this specific topic here as well: What you
intend to write is more important than the character you actually write.

Handwriting Chinese characters: The minimum requirements – This article goes through
the nitty-gritty of writing characters by hand, the kind of things that your teacher
might mention briefly now and then, but isn’t typically taught at all these days.
Note that while the title says “minimum”, this goes beyond what most second
language learners need.

36 samples of Chinese handwriting from students and native speakers – While not
being advice about how to write by hand, this article might nevertheless be
interesting because it shows you how other people write Chinese characters by hand,
which is not always easy to find if you’re learning Chinese in your home country.
More importantly, they write exactly the same text, so you can compare! Samples
include both native speakers and second language learners on various levels.

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3 Reviewing and remembering Chinese characters

I’ve learnt characters for more than a decade, and as all long-time learners can
testify, Chinese character knowledge is something you have to use constantly or you
will forget what you have learnt. This is particularly true for handwriting, but this
part is not limited to handwriting in particular, but rather the general goal of
remembering what we learn.
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3.1 How to not forget the Chinese characters you’ve learnt

The first and most obvious thing to say is that you have to review characters to
remember them. This can be done in many ways, such as reading a lot, typing, using
apps to review and so on, but if you don’t review, you will forget most of what you
have learnt.

An introduction to extensive reading for Chinese learners – Reading has many

benefits for your learning in general, but it’s definitely the best way to review
characters and vocabulary in general. If you read extensively, i.e. where you
understand almost everything you read, you can also learn new characters and words
this way!

Three ways to improve the way you review Chinese characters – Most students don’t
review characters very efficiently, so this article goes through there important ways
to improve: 1) understand what you’re doing, 2) spread out your reviews (see spaced
repetition below), and 3) make sure your review method is valid (meaning that what
you learn actually is transferable to the area you want to use it in).

Spaced repetition software and why you should use it – Reading involves passive
recognition, rather than active recall. If you want to get most out of every minute
you spend on vocabulary review, you should check out spaced repetition software, or
SRS for short. These programs use flashcards to combine active recall with efficient
scheduling of reviews, which has been shown to have very large benefits on retention.
You don’t have to use SRS and it has its limits, but it is a very powerful way of
remembering everything you’ve learnt. You can of course use the spacing effect
without using flashcards!

Skritter review: Boosting your Chinese character learning – My favourite app for
learning Chinese characters and words, particularly geared towards deep processing
and writing by hand on screen. I’ve used this app for almost a decade now and I
still try to use it every day. Requires a subscription, but also offers som content
completely for free.

Anki, the best of spaced repetition software – This app is for students who like
full control and to be able to tinker with their spaced repetition experience. Anki
is not designed specifically for Chinese, but there is a very useful Chinese support
plug-in that adds a lot of useful features. Anki is free on all platforms except iOS.

Reading is a lot like spaced repetition, only better – Let’s remember that there’s
no magic involved in SRS; it’s just a clever way of scheduling flashcard reviews.
You can get the same effect by reading a lot, which is what this article compares.
While flashcards might be more efficient for certain things (such as handwriting
Chinese characters), reading has lots of other benefits that flashcards don’t have.

You can’t learn Chinese characters by rote – Technically, you can learn characters
by roe, but it takes so much time that it’s impossible for most second language
learners. While you can brute-force characters into your long-term memory, unless you
understand what you’re doing and are able to form meaningful connections between
characters and other knowledge stored in your brain, it will be very, very hard to
remember in the long run.

Learning to write Chinese characters through communication – Both written and spoken
language exist for the purpose of communication, yet few people learn characters in a
communicative setting. By relying on handwritten input on your phone (among other
things), you can integrate writing characters into a meaningful context and your
learning is driven by your own desire to express yourself, rather than what happens
to be in the next chapter of your textbook.

7 ways of learning to write Chinese characters – When choosing how to review

characters, take your long-term goals for learning Chinese into account. You need to
make sure that the way you practise will actually get you to your goal. This article
goes through seven ways of reviewing characters, discussing the pros and cons of
each: writing on paper, writing with your finger, writing in your mind, writing on
screen without feedback, writing on screen with feedback, no writing just looking,
and finally, only reading and typing

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3.2 Mnemonics and improving your memory

Memory is often seen as something fixed, so either you’re born with a good one or
you’re stuck with bad memory for the rest of your life. But this is not true. Our
ability to remember things can be trained, both in the sense that we get better at it
the more we do it, but also in the sense that there are techniques and tricks that
can vastly improve your ability to remember.

Some of these tricks have been known since ancient times, others have been discovered
through research in cognitive science (a nice summary can be found here). Some
techniques are hard to learn, but others are actually very easy!

Remembering is a skill you can learn – The most important lesson of all is that you
can train your memory. This has been testified by many different people over the
years, but my favourite of these come from Joshua Foer, known to most through his TED
talk and his book Moonwalking with Einstein. In the linked article, I explain the
basics and we try them out with a simple experiment.

Using memory aids and mnemonics to make Chinese easier – There are many techniques
available and they can all be used to learn Chinese characters. This includes memory
palaces, the loci method, the journey method, and, the method I use most often,
simply associating meaningful concepts and images in ways that stand out in a way
that makes them easy to remember later.

How to create mnemonics for general or abstract character components – In general,

it’s easier to remember concrete, meaningful things that can be related to what you
already know in a clear way. Hence, it’s easier to remember the word “Baker” if
you think of an actual baker, compared to if you think of it as a surname. Some
things we want to learn are abstract or hard to pin down, so what to do? Make them
concrete, because even made-up meaning is better than no meaning.

Are mnemonics too slow for Chinese learners? One common complaint about using
mnemonics for language learning is that they are too slow. However, this criticism
misses the point: the role of mnemonics is as a stepping stone from not knowing to
knowing. Recalling, even if slowly, is much better than not recalling. Gradually,
mnemonics can be cast aside, except for handwriting characters where they remain
useful even for very advanced learners.

Don’t use mnemonics for everything – When introduced to the fantastic world of
memory hacking and mnemonics, some people go all-in and want to use them to learn
everything. However, this is not really necessary and will create a lot of extra
work. Chinese is still a language, not a list of abstract things to memorise. Use
mnemonics when you need to, not as the default solution to remember things you’d
probably remember without them.

Back to index

3.3 Practical considerations: Where and how to review

Learning Chinese characters does not take place in a vacuum, so we also need to put
learning into the general context of our daily lives.

Time quality: Studying the right thing at the right time – If you want to learn
Chinese efficiently (as in much learnt per unit time spent), time quality is very
important. For example, time with a teacher should be spent on things you can only do
with a teacher (hint: learning the basic meaning and writing of characters is not
such a thing). When it comes to learning and remembering characters, this means that
you should…
Diversify how you study Chinese to learn more – This means that you should spread
out your learning as much as possible and use different ways to integrate it with the
other things you like to do or are obliged to do. Learning Chinese is not limited to
an hour a few times a week when you sit down to “learn some Chinese”. Listen to
Chinese all the time while going about your daily activities, write characters on
your shower walls and make sure you get most of your flashcard reviews done while
waiting in lines, commuting or in other periods of brief downtime.

Back to index

3.4 Beyond beginner: Character learning in the long term

Finally, I’d like to offer some advice for those of you who have been learning for a
while now.

The real challenge with learning Chinese characters – Beginners think that learning
new characters is the hardest part of learning to read and write characters, but more
advanced students know that keeping all of them apart and knowing when to use which
is where the real challenge is at. There are many things you can do about this, some
of which we covered above, but also…

Dealing with Chinese characters you keep mixing up – The key to sorting out
characters you’re mixing up is to trace your errors and figure out why you’re
confusing them. It’s often the case that you have overlooked something,
misunderstood a key piece of information or that the problem is easily solvable just
by looking at the two characters next to each other. Often, we are subconsciously
confused without realising it!

7 mistakes I made when writing Chinese characters and what I learnt from them – To
show you the above-mentioned error tracing in action, I wrote this article where I go
through seven mistakes I’ve made with my own character writing recently, tracing
each error to the source.

Chinese characters that share the same components but are still different – This is
particularly tricky case of mixing characters up. Normally, I don’t encode the order
of the components when creating mnemonics because only one way of writing the
character looks even vaguely right. But this doesn’t work if the characters have
exactly the same components!

A minimum-effort approach to writing Chinese characters by hand – Finally, let’s

look at the minimum-effort approach to maintaining the ability to write by hand. This
is for those who you who, like me, want to be able to write by hand, but are too busy
to spend more time than absolutely necessary. The approach includes for components:
reading, typing, spaced repetition and communicative handwriting.
Back to index

Conclusion

The goal of this article is to provide a handy guide for all matters related to
learning Chinese characters. There are probably things I have omitted or forgotten to
mention, so if you have a question that is not covered here, please leave a comment
below!

Editor’s note: This article, originally published in 2015, was rewritten from
scratch and massively updated in February, 2021.

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Olle Linge Wednesday, February 24th, 2021 9 comments

9 comments

Patricia Zulueta says:

2017-04-30 at 11:54
Very good article!! In my classes, I try to use some of the techniques explained
above and I also add semantic mapping as a way to review the characters meaning and
learn new ones.

Reply

陆卡思 says:

2017-05-09 at 20:11

This is an awesome article! Now I have a list of every article about learning Chinese
I could ever hope for. 谢谢您！

Reply

Josh says:

2017-10-26 at 07:08

Hey Olle, this is a great article and I think the only thing I’d want to change here
is that there is a big difference between learning to recognize characters and
knowing how to write characters. Currently in China, the latter is becoming less and
less common.

Don’t get me wrong, learning to write characters is a valuable skill, but I think
that for many students, just learning to recognize characters is enough if your
primary objective is to become fluent orally. Learning to write takes learning
Chinese to a whole new level of dedication!

I’ve put together my own list of great tools for learning Chinese, many of which
you’ve listed here as well but quite a few that you haven’t. I’m a huge fan of
graded readers, which help with character recognition.

Reply

Olle Linge says:

2017-10-28 at 10:25

Ah, but I mainly recommend learning to write characters to beginners, not because
they will write tons of Chinese by hand, but because I believe it’s very difficult
to understand how characters work without actually writing them. If you’re not after
handwriting itself, you don’t need to learn to write thousands of characters by
hand, but as a beginner, I stil strongly suggest writing by hand, even if you stop
focusing on that later.

Reply

SALIM says:

2019-01-27 at 09:02

I want study Chinese characters , i can learn PiYin very well and speak but i can not
read or write chinese characters .

do you have a help please §

Salim

Reply

Olle Linge says:

2019-01-29 at 10:31

Hi! The article you have commented on contains a lot of advice on how to learn to
read and write Chinese characters. Which methods have you tried? What worked? What
didn’t?

Reply

Michael M says:

2019-10-02 at 23:14

I have been using a website called ‘remembr.it’ during these past three months. It
helps to memorise up to 2200 characters.

It uses Spaced Repetition software like Anki and Skritter, and I have found it quite
useful. I have memorised about 700 characters so far using it, spending about 90
minutes daily on it.

Reply

Juliana says:

2020-09-24 at 10:16

I’m becoming a little frustrated while trying to learn characters, so I would really
appreciate some advice. I am an intermediate learner when using pinyin, but almost a
total beginner when it comes to characters.

I tried Anki, but I guess I’m so used to Memrise where I have to type in or choose
the correct answer, that simply flipping the card was just not doing much for my
memory. Pleco is available for mobile only, so I can’t use it on my laptop 🙁

I am currently learning a Memrise course “First 500 characters”

(https://app.memrise.com/course/268/first-500-characters-in-mandarin-chinese/) and I
got to about 270 characters so far, but I found that:

1. it is extremely difficult for me to differentiate between similar characters, like

任 appoint, 许 allow, 性 – gender, 件 – correspondence, 住 – live – they all seem
almost same to me and every time I have to type one of them I’m mostly guessing

2. it is hard to memorize characters out of context, because very often the character
is never/rarely used by itself, my italki tutor asked me why am I even learning 件 or
任 since apparently they are not used as standalone words

I tried to create my own Memrise course with high-frequency words but again it
wasn’t easy to memorize words that consist of 2-3 characters.

I guess what I need is a course which explains the radicals first and then teaches
high frequency words. I tried this course for radicals
(https://app.memrise.com/course/47843/common-simplified-chinese-radicals/) and it was
not easy to remember those that are not commonly used – like ladle, inch, minister,
tiger stripes (where am I going to use/need tiger stripes?)
Do you maybe know of any course/website that could help me out? Thank you so much in
advance!

Reply