The Hanzi Movie Method is the technique for speed memorizing Chinese characters that is the core of our entire 4,200 lesson curriculum. Each Chinese character becomes a movie scene in your head, complete with actors, props, sets, and scripts. All of these directly map onto an element of the character that you want to memorize.
Use objects to remember the character components.
You can use our suggestions, those of other course members, or choose a completely new 3D object that represents the meaning or appearance of the component you need to learn. We call these object props. Use people and places from your life to remember the pinyin and tones.
Use people to remember the pinyin initials.
Choose the people from your life who mean the most to you to be the actors in your movie scenes. These can be real people or fictional characters from books, movies, or tv shows you love. The better you know them, the easier they will be to remember.
Use places to remember the pinyin finals. Choose buildings you know well to represent the endings of Chinese syllables known as finals. These movie sets can be places you've lived, homes of friends and families, workplaces, stores, or any other places you know well.
Use rooms to remember the five tones.
The rooms within your sets will represent the tone of the character you are learning. Outside the entrance represents the first tone, in the hallway or kitchen, represent the second tone, bedrooms and living room represent the third tone, the bathroom and backyard represent the fourth tone, and the fifth tone is on the roof.
Shoot movie scenes in your mind to remember any character.
The movie scenes or scripts are the most fun part, and it's where it all comes together. Your actor will interact with the various props within the right room of the right set to visually represent the meaning of the Chinese character you need to learn. Follow our expert guidance and suggestions from other learners on our course on how to do this for any character to create the most memorable movie scene possible.
Using this technique, you will learn how to read, pronounce, and even write any Chinese character in less than one minute, and never forget. As your skills improve, we will introduce Special Effects inspired by the teachings of world memory champions and our innovations from hundreds of hours of practice. Use different camera angles, extras, explosions, and slow-motion to make your mini-movies even more vivid and personal to you.
As you can see, there are a lot of moving parts to this method, and it takes between 5 and 20 characters to get the hang of it. Once you get in the swing of things, you will find that there is no better method for learning characters available.
There are other ways of learning characters out there, and some of them work quite well. The most important thing is that you learn as many characters as soon as possible.
In for a Penny, in for a found.
Once you start learning characters using a method that works, your goal should be to learn how to read and pronounce the most common 3,000 of them as soon as you can. Don't try to learn them all at once, though, as too much bottom-up learning gets demotivating. You may sign up to our course now.