Learning Characters

In Mandarin, apart from the tonal pronunciation, recognizing the Chinese characters is a stumbling block to most people. This stems from the lack of alphabets, that makes memorizing the written characters difficult. However there are various strategies that can be employed.

Most of the approaches involve studying the genealogy of the characters. The original characters, say, from the bone-shell inscription, provide a more evocative relation between the written character and its meaning. However there is a weakness with this approach as the the modern written character have often diverged from original written character, hence making remembering the character based on the bone-shell character dubious.

So we want to do away with this practise unless it makes sense. We make no bones about following historical accuracy unless it aids in memorizing. For some of the characters that are deemed pictorial based, we will approach in this manner, i.e. making the link between image-based representation of its meaning and the written character.

For example, if you are beginning learner, you may have problem remembering these 4 characters:

• 气   (Air) 
  
• 象   (Elephant) 
• 龟  (Tortoise) 
  
• 鸟  (Bird) 

How can you remember these characters?