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Skritter review – a great way of learning how to write Chinese characters

Posted on | May 25, 2011 | 1 Comment

Learning how to write Chinese characters is hard, and we can use all the help we can get. Skritter (http://www.skritter.cn) is a website that uses some clever web coding to create a novel way of helping you learn characters.

The strongest feature of Skritter in my opinion is its tool for Chinese character writing with real time feedback. This is unique as far as I am aware. When you draw a character the strokes you have drawn ‘fall’ into the right place – so every time you make a stroke a little too short, or forget the hook, or make it too straight – it will show you immediately what it should look like, and then let you continue on with writing the other strokes. Similarly, it will let you know if the stroke is in the wrong order, or wrong direction. It will even give you a hint if you are completely stuck as to which stroke comes next. Using Skritter has taught me that I have been writing the liang of piao liang (漂亮 – beautiful) wrong for months. I had been putting 儿 for the last two strokes instead of 几, and skritter would not let me get away with it!

Skritter is full of other useful features that should aid the language learner such as an inbuilt Spaced Repetition System, Audio reinforcement, and character decompositions, and user created mnenomics (see http://www.skritter.cn/pricing for a full list). Alongside which the studying is very customizable, allowing you to focus on exactly what you need whether that is just writing, or if reading and remembering the correct tone are also important to you.

However, to be honest, I am not going to be using it beyond the free trial. Partly that is due to the monthly fee ($10), but also I have already been learning for a while and I have found a set of other resources that provide almost all the features that Skritter provides.

But if you are new to learning to write Chinese characters, then it could be an excellent place for you to start. Skritter is not free, but they do let you have a two week free trial to experiment to see if it works for you. Hope this Skritter review helpful for those who want to give it try.

 

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Category: Chinese characters, Language, Resources

How to learn Chinese characters (p-1)

Posted on | May 18, 2011 | Comments Off

If you are a westerner then learning Chinese characters is going to be hard and require months and years of study. But there are many things you can do to make the task slightly easier. One resource that I have been recently using is a book called “Rembering Simplified Hanzi 1” by Heisig and Richardson.

It is not a cheap book, but the book’s subtitle tells you why it could be invaluable: “How not to forget the meaning and writing of Chinese characters”. You see it can be relatively easy to learn a new character, you look at it, hide it, and then draw it a few times and in theory you have learnt it – but the hard part is remembering that same character later on.

Now Heisig’s approach is slower but more efficient! When learning each character you will spend more time learning it than with the first approach, but you save time in the long run because having learnt it once you don’t forget it, either to read or to write. A remarkable claim!

A further claim of Heisig is that “if you were to study them full time, there is no reason why all 1,500 characters in Book 1 could not be learned successfully in four to five weeks”.

The key to Heisig’s approach is that he gives you stories that stick in your mind that relate the meaning of the character to the component parts. The stories are purposefully vivid and unbelievable, but that makes them very simple to remember, and as long as you remember the crazy story then the character is straightforward to write. Therefore his book systematically teaches characters so that new characters build upon the previously learnt characters.

Below is the link of the book 《Rembering Simplified Hanzi》on Amazon.

Remembering Simplified Hanzi: Book 1, How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Chinese CharactersLearn Chinese Books)

 

 

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Category: Chinese characters, Language, Learning Approaches

Chinese Character of the week – 糟糕：‘Oh no!How terrible’!

Posted on | May 11, 2011 | Comments Off

My favourite Chinese character of this week:

Zāo gāo 糟糕

‘Oh no!’ ‘How terrible!’

Have I had a bad week? Well, no, not really, but I did have a ‘糟糕’ moment related to trying (and I use that word deliberately!) to bake a cake in a toaster oven.

Although it seems like a pretty complicated (or messy!) character on first look, breaking it down into it’s two parts really helped me…

Zāo 糟 on it’s own has a number of meanings, one of which is to be in a mess/in a terrible state.

Gāo 糕 on it’s own however, means cake!

Since more than one of my 糟糕 moments have been related to cooking, it seemed a good enough reason to have this as my character for this week! (More on the joys of toaster oven cooking another time!!)

 

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Category: Chinese characters, Language
Tags: Chinese character

Chinese character of the week:打针 -to have an injection

Posted on | May 5, 2011 | Comments Off

My favourite Chinese character of this week:

打针: To have an injection

Dǎ zhēn 打 针

An odd Chinese character to have, you may think. But this is my Chinese character of the week for a number of reasons. Firstly, I’ve finally managed to learn it (for some reason, it has never stuck before, despite covering it first about three months ago!)

Secondly, I have had my first proper bout of illness since arriving here, so it reminded me that knowing some medical words can be useful (though I do realise this may not be the most useful!)

Finally, it is actually an interesting character. The second character, zhēn 针 has the metal radical next to something that looks awfully like a needle. So that’s fairly logical. However, when I first came across it, I already knew the first character – dǎ  打. Now the only meaning I knew at that point was ‘to play’. What it has helped me to learn, is that some characters can have multiple meanings (my dictionary gives 27 for dǎ  打!)  Slightly disheartening at times, but better than ‘playing’ at sticking a needle into someone, which was what I first thought it meant!!

(Non language aside – always good to make sure you have all your vaccinations up to date!)

 

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Category: Chinese characters, Language
Tags: Chinese character

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