On 4 November 2011 18:46, George Wade <[email protected]> wrote:
> Chinese seem to have words mostly made up of two or more letters, to > describe it in English. For us to practice single letters is mostly > artificial and strange. Worth while for the very, very beginning, > perhaps? But even those meanings have little use. > Possibly! However, that very very beginning is a short period of time when learning English, since there are only 26 letters (ignoring bigrams and inconsistent pronounciation rules etc), whereas in Chinese we need to know at least 2000-3000 characters to be able to get by. To be able to produce those characters, the only feasible way is to learn each character individually. For a while I had multi-character words as production cards, trying to write them on paper before flipping them. This was much, much too difficult and really demotivated me for a while, until I wrote a script to flip all those cards around and only do production for single characters. In any case, the characters still do have individual meanings even if they rarely appear on their own, and the combinations of two or more characters probably results in a totally unmanageable number of words (may as well be infinite, for practical purposes). OTOH, if you learn to produce the individual characters, there's only a few thousand to get through which is finite and do-able. That way, even if you don't understand a particular word (which may always happen), you can make a guess based on the individual characters. Chinese is usually quite systematic, so you can often guess at the meaning of a word from first principles, e.g.: 别 => do not 动 => move; movement; action 队 => team; group 别动队 => commando unit/secret agent squad So knowing the individual characters to some level is helpful in some instances where you don't already know every multiple-character word. But I totally agree that it would be somewhat useless to only learn the characters in isolation. I must admit to not being anything close to fluent after several years of studying Chinese, because I didn't focus enough on understanding sentences. The context and concreteness of real sentences is extremely important, and something that my deck really needs more of! But I learn with pictures and need a phrase, at least; so I don't mean > to argue with other students who Think Different. > > Not at all, I will gladly steal all of your good ideas for my own use! :) Oisín > George > > > On 03/11/2011 17:35, Oisín wrote: > > On 3 November 2011 20:41, Lindsey <[email protected]> wrote: > >> But what do you do about the reverse card? Do you have to get all 4 >> meanings to consider it a successful recall? 菜 isn't so bad but I >> think I've got around 10 definitions for 上 and it's growing. >> > > Ah, now I see what you mean! Yes, some characters are problematic... e.g. > 委 seems to have about 8 distinct meanings. I'd put all of them as a hint on > the front side and try to remember each one. > > However, this is difficult and not accurate in terms of common usage. Many > such meanings never appear as a single character. > Countless times I've asked native speakers "this character means 'silent', > right? Says so in the dictionary?" and been told "What? Not really... not > on its own anway, only together with this or that character". > > Because of this I don't use reverse cards for individual characters. > Instead, I have words of two or more characters (which are less ambiguous > and easier to learn). When there are multiple meanings for a word, I make > them like this: > > ;; > Front: > > 精神 > > (s|g|v) > > Back: > > jing1shen2 > > 1. spirit; mind > 2. gist; essence > 3. vigour; vitality; energy > ;; > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "mnemosyne-proj-users" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] > . > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/mnemosyne-proj-users?hl=en. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "mnemosyne-proj-users" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mnemosyne-proj-users?hl=en.
