HSK - Poll: Amount of time to learn a Chinese character -

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Poll: Amount of time to learn a Chinese character
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View Poll Results: # of times, on average, you need to write out a character before you can
reproduce it
I am superhuman; I just need to look at them 6 13.33%
1-5 10 22.22%
6-10 9 20.00%
11-15 2 4.44%
16-20 5 11.11%
21-25 3 6.67%
26-30 3 6.67%
31-40 0 0%
41-50 2 4.44%
51 + 5 11.11%
Voters: 45. You may not vote on this poll



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self-taught-mba -

I've been wanting to ask this for while. For those that write out the characters on those practice
sheets (like most schools do): What is the average number of times you have to write out the
character before you consider it learnt?

How does this relate to time? Meaning, how long does it take you to write it out 5, 10, 20 times
etc.? Your comments are welcome.



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roddy -

For my money, it's not a matter of 'number of times of writing'. It's
a) time over which you practice it - ie I reckon if you write it ten times on one day, you'll
forget it in a month. Write it once every three days for a month though . . .
b) contextual encoding. Just learning an isolated, lonely, 服 isn't going to work so well as
learning 服, which is a member of the 月 radical set (有,肚,育...), the set that share the
same right-hand component (报, and I can't think of any more because I don't practice what I
preach) and which relates to a set of words using 服 (服务,说服,服从,服药)
c)how you practice writing it. Copying it off the left hand side of your character sheet doesn't
require you to drag it up from memory. Something like dictation including that character, or
attempting to write all characters with a certain radical / component will. I honestly don't think
copying something really hooks it into your brain. Or maybe my brain is hook-resistant.

As for time to write a character? No more than 1 or 2 seconds if I actually know it. Maybe 10-15
minutes for a well-formed 像, 参 or 家 - I can never get those ones right.










wushijiao -

For me, I usually have to write a character over and over, and even then, I might forget how to
write it.

I agree with Roddy that contextual encoding is very important.

A great book for learning characters is "张老师教汉字：汉字识写课本/Learning Chinese
Characters ffom Ms. Zhang"　张惠芬－编者.

This book is great at finding the links between characters so that you will remember how to write
them easier. An example is, they give you the characters 集，准，谁，难, and ask you to
form words with each. Another example is the set 宜，助，租。 Then it asks you to identify
the common component of each character. Anyway, the book has tons of cross-refrencing stuff like
that to help you remember how to write the characters.

So, I think writing out characters again and again can't be avoided. But there are ways to speed
up the remembering process.










randall_flagg -

And: don't forget to actually THINK the word while you are writing the character. Don't just let
your hand move and do the job, try to picture the meaning of the word you are writing, however
abstract that meaning may be. This makes a huge difference. Don't listen to music or watch TV when
writing characters, focus, focus, focus (that said, I have to admitt that I love to listen to
music while writing characters, only to find out that I've wasted my time...and I just keep doing
it...will probably do so again tomorrow and the day after that...)










imron -

I usually don't write characters down at all when learning them, but I do spend enough time
looking at them, analysing them, breaking them down into component parts and making sure that I
can reproduce them visually with my mind's eye (normally I won't move on to another character
until I can do this). I guess I'd probably spend as much time as I would writing out the character
5-10 times, but seeing as I don't actually write them, I guess I have no choice but to choose the
superhuman option

But there's really nothing superhuman about this technique, it's just taking the time to train
active recall, which I've found to be far more effective than writing the character out again and
again.










gato -



Quote:

I usually don't write characters down at all when learning them, but I do spend enough time
looking at them, analysing them, breaking them down into component parts and making sure that I
can reproduce them visually with my mind's eye

It's probably hard to improve your penmanship with your mind's eye, though. Hehe.










imron -

Ah, but you can improve your penmanship by writing articles/stories/anything instead of just
copying a character over and over. I'm not saying I never write, just that I never write to learn
characters.










lokki -

That poll is pretty much useless the way I see it since it stops at 51+. It would make more sense
if went up to 500 or so in steps of 50.

Some characters require less and some more, but somewhere around a hundred repetitions is the
minimum for me. For some it is probably several hundred.










self-taught-mba -



Quote:

That poll is pretty much useless the way I see it since it stops at 51+. It would make more sense
if went up to 500 or so in steps of 50.

Some characters require less and some more, but somewhere around a hundred repetitions is the
minimum for me. For some it is probably several hundred.

51+ would indicate it doesn't stop. Why don't you go ahead and vote? It seems the 51+ crowd is a
minority (just me voting). Just trying to capture the average. (I am a 51+ person too)










lokki -

I did vote, yes, but if more people are like me and you the distribution might well run from
somewhere around 50 to several hundred and that poll will fail to reflect the interesting part of
the curve.












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