Archive for February 2012

Techniques in Learning Chinese Characters

In recent days, there are many foreign learners come to study Chinese in Keats School. Thisis the first peak period after the Spring Festival. Unfortunately, the teachers at Keats School also find that some foreigners feel it is really difficult to learn Chinese characters so that they are going to give up learning characters. As a matter of fact, those students are all fall into a misunderstanding that they can completely master the Chinese language without learning characters. Since you learn Chinese in China, take more time to practice listening and speaking and you can set reading and writing aside for a while.
In order to solve this problem, the teaching group at Keats School held a meeting to discuss. In the meeting, the teaching director summarized the experience of learning Chinese characters. In fact, the characters’ learning is always a difficult point for students to study Chinese. As a result, most students choose to learn to speak Chinese but not wrote because of the difficulty in characters. Keats School has studied this subject for a period of time, making efforts to help students overcome the difficulty in learning Chinese characters and find thetechniques to learn better. 
After the study and discussion, the following three techniques are summarized as a help for students learn Chinese characters. The first point is to relate the characters with Chinese culture. In order to memorize the characters effectively, you should find out the meanings of Chinese characters but not learn them separately. Carrying a history of several thousand years, Chinese character itself is the symbol of Chinese culture, especially the original complex form of Chinese characters.
If the overseas students are interested in the complex form of Chinese characters, they might know they can explore the ancient Chinese culture and people’s thinking styles by analyzing the character structure. If you attend to group Mandarin class in China, teachers may usually attach less importance to the character culture. However, if you learn Chinese one-on-one, teachers may explain the origin of the Chinese characters to gain your interest.