To speak Chinese fluently, you will need vocabulary. To acquire vocabulary, you need to read and listen a lot, and to read, you need to be able to decipher the Chinese characters.
Once you've started to get to grips with pronunciation, you should jump into characters with both feet. Below are a few reasons why:
Learning a word without knowing its characters first is top-down learning.
Learning Chinese characters first creates many more connections to a word, and more connections mean less forgetting. Without attaching a new word to foundational knowledge, your brain will see the word as unimportant and will quickly delete it.
Knowing Chinese characters is far more efficient.
The majority of Chinese words are structured very logically compared to English. Most are just as straightforward as the word outdoors, seatbelt or playground. Now, imagine trying to learn playground without knowing what play or ground meant.
Characters can be words, too.
People like to compare Chinese characters to the English alphabet, in terms of their function in Chinese. In reality, there are morphemes. Morphemes are the smallest meaningful unit of a language, which we like to call mini-meanings. Here's an English example:
We can split unexpected into un-expect-ed. You use neither un nor ed by themselves, but they both have their meanings and also influence the definition of the word. Chinese characters function in the same way. Some of them are words, some of them are not, but with rare exception, they are all morphemes.
By learning characters, you will naturally learn many words, and at the same time, develop a repertoire of building blocks vital for understanding and memorizing compound words.
You can notice how Chinese words are structured.
There are a limited number of ways characters can combine to form Chinese words. These word structures are a fascinating aspect of Mandarin that sets it apart from many other languages, and awareness of them provides a couple of advantages.
The first benefit is the ability to notice patterns in words that you may not have seen otherwise. Let's take a look at one of the most common Mandarin word structures, which we called biased structure. We call it biased structure because the first Chinese character always hold the critical piece of information that defines the word.
The second character 人 rén means person, and the first character (or morpheme) signifies which kind of person. For example, ⼯人 is a worker. ⼥人 is a woman. 富人 is a wealthy person, etc. Learning patterns like these within Mandarin words will allow you to learn new words a lot faster, and it makes learning vocabulary much less intimidating.
Another benefit of knowing these structures is the ease of creating mnemonic devices. For example, 说明 shuōmíng (explain) consists of 说 shuō (to speak) and 明 míng (bright/clear). This word is a verb-result structure. Verb-Result words always have a verb as the first character and the result of that verb as the second. When I speak until something is clear, then I’ve explained it.
Even if you weren’t aware that 明 míng had the alternative meaning of clear, you could create a mnemonic image in your mind based on the more common meaning of bright.
How Many Characters Do You Need to Learn?
It is essential to recognize that Chinese, like any other language, has characters and words that are used more frequently than others, and this is where you should start.
The 250 most commonly used characters make up a whopping 64% of everyday language. Move onto the most common 500 characters, and you’ve reached around 80%.
Getting to 3,000 characters is your ultimate goal, which is the average amount that a native Chinese speaker can recognize.
Now you know many characters you need to learn, it’s time to share with you the best possible way to learn characters in existence right now.
How to Learn Chinese Characters Easily
The most effective methods for learning characters employ specific memory techniques that tap into our innate ability to visualize. These same memory techniques are used by world memory athletes to perform such feats as memorizing a deck of cards in 16.96 seconds or 70,000 numbers of Pi in 17.25 hours. The fantastic news about this is that anyone can learn how to remember like a memory athlete; you just need the right coaching.
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