learning chinese characters

[AlanHawkes]

Chinese Characters
While you can get quite a way using pinyin, for example you can survive on this introductory course, eventually you will probably find it frustrating without learning to recognise some Chinese characters. The problem is that many pinyin words, even when restricted to a particular tone, may correspond to a dozen or so different characters: you soon start asking yourself “which ‘shi’ is that?” It is long and hard to gain a reasonable mastery but, if you learn some of the easier and more common characters as you go along, it makes it easier in the long run.
There are several ways of helping you to remember or recognise characters. You can use flash cards; you can practise writing them by hand or you can type them on a computer. Methods of typing are described on the class web site. Usually this involves typing the pinyin: the computer returns an array of possible characters and you choose the one you want – this gives you lots of practice in character recognition.

When you see a new or unrecognised character you will want to know “how is it pronounced? (i.e. what is the pinyin version)”, “what does it mean?” or “how do I handwrite it?”

1. The best way is to ask Li Hui (李辉). Unfortunately she is not always available.
2. If I have an electronic version of a character, I can cut and paste it into my invaluable electronic dictionary. I can do this if the character is part of an electronic document; if it is on paper then I scan it with special Chinese character recognition software (by IRIS).
3. Otherwise, a really excellent book is Laurence Matthews-Chinese character fast finder -- published by Tuttle. This has a very fast method of character recognition. It doesn’t give much detail about meaning but, once you know the pinyin (which it does give) you can easily look it up in one of the normal dictionaries.

I also find the following useful:-
Times Chinese Character Dictionary, produced by Federal Publications for Times Publishing Group, Singapore. It is harder to find a given character (you need to count the number of strokes in writing it; you can become reasonably proficient with practise) but easy to find if you know the pinyin. It usefully shows both handwritten and printed characters and shows you the usual stroke order to handwrite the character.

That should be enough for beginners but, if you get really keen on characters, you might like
William McNaughton’s Reading and Writing Chinese: simplified character edition, 3rd edition -- published by Tuttle. This also shows you how to write characters and provides some understanding of the components of a character and in comparing and contrasting similar characters.

There is a companion volume that deals with traditional characters (used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, for example).
William McNaughton and Li Ying, Reading and Writing Chinese - published by Tuttle.
In my opinion it is a pity that, in moving from the traditional to the simplified edition, it was decided to change from handwritten characters to printed characters. They are not exactly the same (is your handwriting like any printer font that you have ever seen?) and it seems strange to give stroke order information about printed characters that would never be drawn by hand.

Finally, I also like
Yong Ho’s Chinese-English Frequency Dictionary: a Study Guide to Mandarin Chinese’s 500 Most Frequently Used Words - published by Hippocrene Books
This is not about character recognition but obviously tells you which are the most frequently used characters, so important to learn first. The first ten are 的一了是我不在人们有. For each of the 500 characters, it gives a lot of useful examples of how to use them: and you learn quite a bit of grammar along the way. A bit advanced for beginners but second year students should find it OK.