How many Chinese characters per day work/ed for you?

[Dylan95]

How many Chinese characters per day worked for you?

I would also like to hear about what methods worked or didn't work for you?

I'm aware that this number depends entirely on context, on the individual, their experience, their language level, the time they have, their methods etc.

But I'd just like to hear some examples before I start.

[Ezy Ryder]

I think I used to learn at least 20-30 a day, but now with the university and all, I'm doing just 10 a day. It seems rather manageable.

As far as methods go:
1) SRS or forget (about ;) ) it.
2) As far as methods go, Heisig (or your own version of his approach). It's so much easier to remember that, for example, "curtains" is "bamboo" above "cheap", than the 19 strokes of 簾 and their placement... (in other words, learn 簾 after 竹 and 廉; learn 攤 after 手 and 難; learn 語 after 言 and 吾; etc.)
3) Learning to write will not necessarily make you remember characters "better". If you only review writing, it's not unheard of not to be able to "read" characters you can write.
4) I'm no expert on the matter; but it seems to me that writing characters down over and over again can bring better results in the short-term (massed repetition), but not so much in the long-term (probably will mostly just slow/tire you down).

[crush]

I think to start, 5-10 is comfortable. Once you reach 1,000 characters, upping that to 10-15 is comfortable. Around 20-25 you'll start seeing your reviews pile up quickly (into the 100s-200s). Or at least they did for me, and i ended up getting burned out several times. But something magical seems to happen around the 1,000 mark that makes learning new characters a bit easier. Though it all really depends how much time you wanna spend slaving over your reviews every day, i suppose.

[vonPeterhof]

IIRC I started at about 25 per day, but eventually cut it down to like 10-15 after getting swamped with schoolwork. I was doing Heisig's Remembering the Kanji, with the help of the SRS on http://kanji.koohii.com/.

[Dylan95]

I think I used to learn at least 20-30 a day, but now with the university and all, I'm doing just 10 a day. It seems rather manageable.

As far as methods go:
1) SRS or forget (about ) it.
2) As far as methods go, Heisig (or your own version of his approach). It's so much easier to remember that, for example, "curtains" is "bamboo" above "cheap", than the 19 strokes of 簾 and their placement... (in other words, learn 簾 after 竹 and 廉; learn 攤 after 手 and 難; learn 語 after 言 and 吾; etc.)
3) Learning to write will not necessarily make you remember characters "better". If you only review writing, it's not unheard of not to be able to "read" characters you can write.
4) I'm no expert on the matter; but it seems to me that writing characters down over and over again can bring better results in the short-term (massed repetition), but not so much in the long-term (probably will mostly just slow/tire you down).

Learning to write, but not recognizing the characters passively! Thank you for the warning. That is one scary prospect that I've certainly never encountered in my Russian studies.
I usually use mass repetition in my Russian vocab studies, so I guess I'll have to be careful when studying Chinese.

Heisig sounds great. Does it include the pinyin?

[outcast]

I concur with the above, 10-15 a day seems to be the sweet spot. I did that for a year before coming to China.

[vonPeterhof]

Heisig sounds great. Does it include the pinyin?

Oops, sorry, didn't realize that this thread was specifically about Chinese. I only did the Heisig approach for Japanese. Heisig is pretty adamant about not including readings when learning to write characters. This approach makes sense for Japanese where many characters have numerous unrelated and/or dissimilar readings and it's often recommended to just learn words instead of kanji readings. Whether or not this approach makes sense for Chinese is a bit more contested, and I don't feel like I can really comment on that.

As for the site that I linked to, it's primarily designed for the Japanese kanji. The separate services they had for Remembering the Simplified Hanzi and Remembering the Traditional Hanzi have apparently been discontinued, but it's still possible to use the main site for those books to some extent. There are also shared Anki decks for both Simplified and Traditional.