Hey guys,

This has probably been asked many times before, but can anyone advise me - or offer tips - on starting out? I have been learning Mandarin for on and off around 2 years, though I have decided it's about time I start to actually learn the characters. For now I am only interested in the simplified versions.

I have been using Skritter for the past few days having checked it out ages ago when it was in beta. I really enjoy it, and really see the value in it, but so far I am having trouble retaining the characters in my memory.

What I do is draw them multiple times until I can do it without needing the bring up the hint, and keep following through to the next one, the next one etc etc. I find though, while I have memorised one, I'll then memorise another, but when the previous one comes back up - sometimes even the next one in line, I have already forgotten it.

It's nice to sort of dabble with the writing until you guess the character, but outright remembering it is the tricky part.

Can anyone offer any tips regarding this?

My second question - is there a way to just learn them on skritter as flashcards? One of the things i like most is when I open the site up, it offers me a few characters to see if i remember them. While i think the writing part is very important, it would be nice that if i felt like it, I could just do a session of flashcard memory recall. Is this possible?

Thanks in advance,
Marcus

Just keep writing. - Due to similarities, especially phonetic components, learning new characters and remembering old ones gets easier after some time.

I also strongly advise you to take a look at a radical list. That can help you create mnemonics and make sense of small differences within groups of characters.

Agree fully with the above. When you're starting out, writing characters is like writing a word with 15 letters in a foreign language that doesn't make any logical sense. When you recognize the parts that make up a character, writing is like writing a 3-letter word spelled phonetically. I would recommend starting from the very bottom of books like the "New Practical Reader" and start from there learning the simplest characters and, of course, radicals and their meaning.

You could also turn the target retention rate up to 97% to make things come up more rapidly and lessen the chance of forgetting. This will probably be the biggest help in terms of remembering.

For flashcards you can always hit space or hit the "next" button to skip a card (it is counted as correct, unless you mark it with the correct/incorrect button), so it works just like a flashcard. I prefer writing with pen and paper so I actually use this most of the time.

When I first started I added every list that looked remotely interesting, and I found some words *impossible* to remember!

I nuked and did radicals only, then added one list at a time (body parts, food, meat, fruit, then the New Practical Reader text - I studied that at university).

I heartily recommend starting with the Radicals ONLY, then slowly (when you've reached 95-97% accuracy - see progress page) add ONE LIST AT A TIME, preferably lists linked to non-skritter study/experiences.

my 2c.

Cheers for that info - FYI i have only added the 2 or so lists that Skritter reccomended - i am not sure what they were actually.

Ok on checking, they are New practical Chinese reader and Integrated Chinese 1. They seem fairly good/logical so far, providing words that I would expect (and all know the pinyin for anyway).

So you think it might be good to maybe remove these and try some radical only learning initially? I can see the logic in that. Already I find that recognising certain parts of characters does help - like pushing together a few building blocks to form a pyramid opposed to sketching out a formless spiderweb.

Hi Marcus,

I studied the radicals early and it was definitely helpful, but many radicals are not useful words by themselves. Also, you will go crazy if you try to remember all of their often-unrelated definitions (干 has something like 15 random meanings) so I recommend just picking one meaning to associate with each radical; you can learn all the other meanings when you learn other characters, words, and phrases that use those radicals as components.

It can be very helpful to study the way that characters break down into components. I like mdbg.com and zhongwen.com for doing that kind of breakdown. This is the principle behind the Heisig method; although I haven't tried it myself, many people seem to like it.

I would also try to study lots of multi-character words and phrases to provide extra context. Otherwise it can be hard to figure out what characters *really* mean.

James