Mandarin Character Roadmap?

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stormj
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Mandarin Character Roadmap?

Postby stormj » Sun May 07, 2017 11:09 pm

So far, I'm using Anki to brain upload the most common characters (top 100), most common words (top 300), and radicals. I note with some dismay that even if I learn the radicals, it appears that there are http://hskhsk.pythonanywhere.com/homophones?chars=1&expand=no&hsk=no&tones=yesmany homophones for almost every tone/syllable combination. Will I get to a point where I have some feel for what all the different versions of bì mean? or am I just going to need to learn them all and use context?

Im sure that doing the latter will work in a brute force kind of way, but do Mandarin speakers develop a sort of sense of the spirit of these groups?

Do you recommend that I learn by most common words or characters first? I'm thinking actually that words makes more sense.

I have the frequency dictionary of the top 5,000 words, it also has a character list in the back.
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Re: Mandarin Character Roadmap?

Postby Aozora » Sun May 07, 2017 11:38 pm

Many hanzi have a phonetic component that signals what the reading is. You can use that to help you remember the hanzi reading. For example, 唉 挨 埃 娭 騃 欸 all share the reading "ai" (though not with the same tone). The next time you see a hanzi with that phonetic component, it'll be easy to learn the reading if it is also "ai." When you know the components that make the hanzi up, it's easier to learn. Just looking at the ones I listed, we have
mouth+"ai"
hand+"ai"
soil+"ai"
woman+"ai"
horse+"ai"
lack+"ai"

I recommend using some sort of mnemonic to make sense of the hanzi you're learning instead of brute force memorization. You can use mnemonics for the parts that make up the phonetic components too.

To get a feel for reading hanzi, I think it's a combination of repetition through context (reading, textbook stuff, listening), and some systematic learning (mnemonics, SRS). I wouldn't really recommend drilling word lists and hanzi without also studying the language as a whole.
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Re: Mandarin Character Roadmap?

Postby Ezy Ryder » Mon May 08, 2017 4:57 am

Natural speech is probably too fast to process explicitly. At ~150 WPM, and assuming 1.4 syllables per word, that'd require "analysing" some 3.5 characters per second (or about ~285ms per character). So, I'd say, learn words phonetically first; and once you decide to tackle the written language, learn characters first (definitely look into the Heisig order for Traditional or Simplified, whichever you're learning. Also, don't bother learning to write them at first, that won't make you "remember them better", and will only slow you down), and then start learning how words are "spelt". In other words, try to treat learning to listen and learning to read as separate (albeit related and mutually influencing) tasks.

And yes, eventually you will start getting a feel for "what morphemes/characters correspond to what syllable". Really helpful when guessing new words.
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