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Aruba
Time period knowing 1000 Chinese characters for reading
Studying 1+ hours a day of characters... What's the time period to pick up the high frequency words/ 1,000 characters? 3 years? Everybody is different but was wondering about your experiences. Love the language, most popular language on Earth. I am also strengthening 10 other languages so it might hold me back.
United States
In my experience, using flashcards and stuff like that to "memorize" characters in a vacuum is a complete waste of time. When I started LinQ, I only listened to and read the ministories/other content on LinQ and just started to slowly be able to read the kanji without specifically trying to learn it. (I only count a word as known if i can hear it and rad it, kanji included)
In the past, I was trying to learn all the meaning for a specific kanji without context, but this ended yielding no results and was extremely difficult to be successful with, since all the meanings were so disconnected and no other context to latch on to. The current method i use is far more efficient and easier.
Vereinigtes Königreich
I don't know what you mean by "knowing", but if you need to just recognise it and know at least one meaning, this can be done in about 4 months.
I'm learning Kanji for Japanese now, I'm doing 10/day and not having trouble. Of course, it takes a few seconds for me to recognise them, but speed should improve with immersion/practice.
Also, characters != words. Just knowing the Hanzi would not necessarily allow you to understand the words, since words are composed of multiple Hanzi and meaning is frequently not obvious.
There is always James Heisig's books if you are motivated and want to just recognise them.
Belgien
It depends what you mean with 'knowing characters'...
For me, it means that you know the meaning of the character in your own language + the other way round. But also that you know how to pronounce AND write the character.
It also depends on how much time you could spend a day. 3 years for 1000 characters @ 1 hour per day is very realistic.
For your information: I studied Chinese long time ago. In those 8 years I probably learned about 2000 characters. I say characters, which means of course a lot more words made up of up to 3 characters (and some chengyu... haha)
Keep going! But be warned: once you start learning Chinese, you will not be able to stop! It's such a rich and interesting language!
United States
I think studying characters by themselves is utterly useless for the most part. I tried to study Japanese in the past like that, one portion of character study, and another part dedicated to listening, and everything I put into anki returned nothing in the real world. The only actual useful method for learning characters in my experience is just seeing them in a sentence on LinQ enough time to recognize them without thinking, then marking them known.
United States
Some here seem to recommend ANKI or SRS and I would like to add maybe find some Taiwanese Manga, Light Novels and novels of subjects you like. This of course I mean scaled to your level. In the process of reading these I truly think it will help speed you up.
I don't know how Chinese characters are with Chinese only Japanese. Can radicals also help speed up your understanding the further along you are...is curious.
United States
It's a different language but it took me about 6 years to start reading Japanese books without feeling like a total noob. Everyone's different for sure. I started Japanese at age 34. I think if you're younger you can pick this stuff up faster.
Belgien
what's "to pick up?" . I mean if you're just studying characters, their independent meaning and pronounciation, depending on your pace you could do 1000 in a month with the right materials. I did around 2.8-3k kanji with heisig and some other tools in around 5 months I think.
But then there's still actual vocab, compound words, context, slang etc
I'd try to get to as many characters as I can with something like heisig or similar tools in +/- 2 or 3 months and then focus on reading in context.
My experience is centered around JP though, not entirely the same..
United States
In 1 year I learned 1000 as a backseat thing, but you say you are maintaining 10 other languages depending on what this means this could make it take forever lol. Could you elaborate on what you mean by 10 languages and what constitutes maintaining them?
Aruba
I plan on just staying/maintain on ten languages forever that includes Arabic with many dialects. Learning new words and reading materials.
Aruba
Anybody have personal experiences with retaining the Chinese symbols?
United States
I'm taking a Chinese break at the moment, but when I was studying characters, I had some material to read (the wonderful app Immersive Chinese. I had already done all the lessons with listening and pinyin, so it's not new material, making it easier to learn the characters. Each lesson adds 5ish new words and gives you 25 sentences using them and other vocab you've previously learned, total of 936 words. So there's lots of repetition, this'll be key later). Each lesson shows the new words, so I started making a list of the new characters and components in the order that I'd encounter them. I would study the character components and then put components together to study the characters. Then I'd read through the sentences in the lesson using the characters. It's this study + reading the characters in text + text that gives you repetition that leads to retention imo. I would study 8-10 new components/characters each day, but it was time intensive and I eventually stopped after around 400 characters because of that and went back to just listening/pinyin, I did that in 2 months, 1.5 to 2 hours a day (plus an hour of listening, and some time reading, just became too much). 3 to 5 a day + some reading would be more reasonable. Do as many as you have time for and motivation.
As for the "study the characters and components part" I had a grid paper notebook that'd I'd practice writing each character several times. You probably don't need to do this but I find writing characters to be fun. I do a 3 day sliding window. I'd review the characters from 2 days ago, write them a few times, then do the same with the characters from yesterday, then the new ones. Then go do some reading. This way I see the new character each day for 3 days, giving you a chance that you'll still remember it when you see it next.
I bought a Tuttle book, "Learning Chinese Characters". It teaches you a mnemonic system to help you remember the 800 characters. It does seem to help, it's fun, but it does take time, so I'm not fully convinced yet. But anyways here's how it works. It gives you a story for each character since stories are easier to remember (I make up my own stories because I don't like theirs, I try to simply them a bit). The stories feature 5 archetypes, each one represents a different tone. There's a giant, fairy, teddy, dwarf and a robot, which represent high, rising, low flat, falling and neutral, respectively. For a character you make up a story of 1 or 2 sentences using the meaning of the components, the meaning of the whole character, the archetype and a word that gives you a sound hint. Eg 这 means this, is made up of the components culture and road with a falling tone. So the sentence I made up was "The dwarf asked "Does this road go to the German culture museum?" So 'this' is the character meaning, it has the words culture and road which are the components, a dwarf indicating falling tone, and the word German which is a sound hint (zhè is similar to Ger). Of course the more vulgar the story the more fun and memorable it is.
Like I said, I'm less convinced of that system, but it is fun and does seem to help you remember the characters, but I'm not sure if it's worth the time/effort or if just more reading would help more. I'm pretty sure I won't keep it up forever and eventually start using anki for characters (using full sentences of course). But the first 2 paragraphs I wrote seem like a solid study program to me.
Sorry to blather for so long, hope it made sense and gives you ideas.
United States
For each basic component, that book also gives you a drawing that incorporates it into it. I do think the visual hint like that really is useful to help you remember them.
Kanada
Just to recognize them? I would imagine just a few months. for french it took just over a 2 months. I understand Chinese is different, but if you are really going at it, @LuckieNoob's idea of 4-5 months sounds about right.
Aruba
I can tell you are smarter than me from your photo. How many languages you know Robert?
Kanada
Can't tell if you are kidding or not, but definitely not. to answer your question: English, around b2 in french and was a2 in german at one point.
Deutschland
If you manage to learn only one character every day roughly 3 years. If you learn 10 every day 4-5 months.
Just divide 1000 / characters you can learn per day.
Aruba
Retaining 10 Chinese Symbols a day is tough challenge.
United States
do you use Anki or an SRS review program? I jammed about 10-15 new characters a day until I hit about the first 2k frequency (then I dropped down to 5 after about 9 months, now I'm at just 2 a day).
If you use SRS and are consistent, it's not an insurmountable obstacle. But how many months that takes a learner depends on the time they can spend a day on it.
You will still forget them constantly, so you do need to do an incredible amount of reading to actually get them to stick and really learn them (there are so many shades of meanings / different definitions so it takes a honest long while to actually say you "know" a character).
Chinese is so much fun! The characters seem intimating, but there is a point where it just starts clicking and the patterns emerge and then it because easy mode of picking up a lot vocab from the combinations.
Kanada
Agree with TofuMeow RE: the SRS approach and consistent reading. I used the Robert Heisig Books for learning the characters, and made my own flashcards in Anki from the books. I reviewed and added characters daily for about 2 years with an average of probably something like 15-20 characters added per day (some days adding more or less than others, some days off here and there). Once I got to my third year of learning Mandarin I stopped reviewing characters as frequently, and now rely solely on reading in order to both learn and retain new characters. If you've heard about Stephen Krashen, you'll know about the Comprehensible Input Method. I'm a big believer in that, and of course aside from speaking with native speakers, reading has been the biggest help for me in learning Mandarin. So all that being said - at this point I'm somewhere in the HSK 5 range after nearly 4 years of studying consistently and not learning other languages at the same time. It will be different for everybody and it depends what your goals are. A good place to start is asking yourself why you want to know the characters? For me, it was to be able to read content written in Chinese whether that was literature, subtitles on Chinese films or Chinese songs at the Karaoke bar.
Aruba
I don't use ANKI or SRS. Will look into them. Thanks.
Belgien
10 is more than feasible indeed with srs
