In the process of learning Chinese (especially at the beginning of the language), many people wonder how to memorize this huge number of new, “incomprehensible” and sometimes “illogical” Chinese words.
- Learn the keys
Many people pass over these “214 friends of the novice Chinese learner” when learning characters. But, all characters are made up of keys in one way or another, so knowing all the keys can allow you to afford to memorize characters without having to spell them out.
So, for example, it is easier to memorize the character 男 nán “man” if you know that it is made up of the keys 田 “field” and 力 “strength” (who but a man to work forcefully in the field); the character 意 yì “thought, idea”, made up of the keys 立 “stand”, 日 “sun”, and 心 “heart”; or the hieroglyph 看 “to look”, made up of the keys 手 “hand” and 目 “eye”, by which we can draw the analogy that when we look at the sun in the distance, we put our hand to our eyes.
- Fantasize
Any hieroglyphic writing is creative, as it developed through the modernization and evolution of pictograph drawings, and any drawing is creative. Be as creative as the ancestors of the Chinese who invented hieroglyphics – start fantasizing. This is especially true for those characters that are difficult to memorize by the meaning of the keys (or the meaning seems illogical).
So, for example, the word 研究 yánjiū means “to investigate”, “to study”. Make up a story that by “removing”/”lifting”/”pushing away”- 扔开 “stone” 石 you will gain access to and be able to explore the “nine” 九 “caves” 穴.
3. Study the “origin” of the characters
Find and read the etymology of hieroglyphs, it is freely available on various online resources. Some hieroglyphs seem incomprehensible illogical until you learn its origin.
The character 新 xīn “new” – in order to build something “new”, one must first “axe” 斤 the connection to the old and “native” 亲.
- Learn phonetics
Above we wrote that all hieroglyphs are made up of keys… this is not quite true, many hieroglyphs are not only made up of keys but also phonetics. Such characters are called phonographic characters, and they are the majority in Chinese. In phonographic characters, one part consists of the semantic key and the other part consists of the phonetic, that is, the key that conveys the reading of the character.
For example, the character 炸 zhà “to explode”, “to burst” consists of the semantic key 火 “fire” and the phonetic 乍 zha. The character 珠 zhū “pearls” consists of the meaning key王 “royal”, “royal” and the phonetics 朱 zhu.
There is a complete table of all the phonetics of Chinese. Download it and learn the phonetics.
- Don’t waste time on character writing, but “draw the characters”
This point is especially useful for those who spend tons of paper on scribbling hieroglyphics, and they still do not memorize. For starters, stop mechanically scribbling hieroglyphs, most likely you just got into the habit of scribbling, and at the moment when you put a character on paper, the memory is turned off and thinking about something else. Put pen and paper aside.
Draw hieroglyphs on anything and everything, but not with a pen in a notebook: with your finger on the glass of the window in the subway or on the bus, while you get through traffic to work or school; with a stick on the sand when you are relaxing on the beach; with chalk on the asphalt near your house; run your finger on the palm of your hand, think of variants.
In this way, you develop the habit of practicing, remember hieroglyphics as if in between, on the road, while on vacation.
- Turn your home into “the abode of hieroglyphics”
If your housemates won’t mind a little “creative mess of a budding Chinese scholar”, there is another psychological way to memorize characters: write characters all over the house. How it works. You write characters with meaning (and reading, if necessary) on colorful stickers and hang them all over the house.
For example, if you want to learn household words, label items in the house with stickers with hieroglyphics. Hang “开关” above the light switch, label the kitchen as “厨房,” let the mirror know it’s 镜子 and the table that it’s actually 书桌.
Once you have surrounded yourself on all sides with characters, your memory will have nothing left to do but memorize all the new words. Once you’ve memorized the characters on the stickers, it’s time to take off the old stickers and hang up new ones with the new words.
This is probably the most fun and effective technique for memorizing hieroglyphics. Before you know it, the whole family will be speaking Chinese to you, because they too, every time they go to the closet, they see that it is “柜子 guìzi”.