I've reached the 1000 word mark, and while I do enjoy skritter, it can sometimes feel like walking through treacle. The emphasis is on what you don't know, rather than what you do, and it took me a bit of time to get my head around that, and to realise that this is actually OK.

I've started to get some compound (two character) words where I already know one or both of the individual characters, and I think this helps in getting the sense of the longer word. I also think this makes it a bit easier to learn the longer word. So, my question really is this: will it continue to be hard, or will it ever get easier to learn Chinese?

I am not an expert yet the more new characters and words you know the easier the new ones should be.

What Sandeep said - once you know more characters, it'll be easier to learn new words, as a lot of them will reuse characters you already know. At an early stage it seems like every word uses new characters, which is tough.

Totally agree with the above sentiments! It gets far easier to learn as you acquire more characters and as you progress your learning experiences a snowball effect.

You are able to "join-the-dots" easier and the characters are not so foreign anymore. However, it is a constant process of learning new words. If you keep Skritter in your daily regimen - and just reading, listening, and talking - then you will make big progress.

It’s always hard. It doesn't really get much easier, sadly. I realized this after I spent six hours listening to adults speak Japanese – I normally teach children and children speak differently – at a BOE meeting which resulted in a massive headache for hours. My brain just couldn’t handle it. This occurred over a year after I first arrived in Japan. It was strange. I thought I was over my “growing pains”.

What does get easier, though, is the amount of effort it takes to relearn the characters or words or sentences you have already studied. The time goes down almost exponentially until you have them memorized by heart. Learning anything new, though, will always take mental effort and attention.

Personally I do not agree with Icecreams view. I feel that it in fact do get easier and easier in many ways. Mostly since new characters after the first 1000 or so are to a large extent just combinations of other characters you learnt before and you only need to remember those parts and not every stroke. Radicals are by this stage also much more firmly anchored in your brain so you do know their meaning and pronunciation making it easier to remember new combinations. Since you by now also can read more in articles, blogs, tv shows etc you will get a more natural context helping learning new words/characters faster and easier. New words are often combining characters you already know. No, it will never be entirely easy but at least easier. I can see this at my daughters progress as well. My oldest is in grade 2 now and she learn almost 50% more new words and characters than in grade 1. She really struggled the first year and now she is reading books in no time and have no problem keeping pace with her Chinese class mates that have this by birth. Her homework is done in no time and last year we had to hire extra help for her homework. So, I do think it is in fact getting easier and easier but more importantly more and more fun! Last week i where so pleases with my progress since i could read most of the shop signs, the menus, understand many songs in the karaoke bar etc. Great progress for an old man already in a few months.

i just hit the 500 mark and i slowly get the feeling of dejavu when i see new words that are made up of characters i know. this is an incredible feeling ...

feels like suddenly you can use the buildingblock "abc" method like we do in the west ...

so as churchill once said: kbo!
(keep buggering on) :)

I feel like I know a good number of words/characters and Skritter is as brutal as ever.

LIVE FOR THE CHALLENGE. Spaced repetition is like a little devil sitting there as you study asking you only the hardest questions. It's great mental exercise.

@ Mandarinboy

You are actually proving my point with your story and examples. Most of what your daughter learned in school -- like all students worldwide -- is simply review from the previous year; most of what you are learning isn’t new either. You are just finally able to process or chunk a slightly larger amount of material. It’s incremental learning. It’s not the same as attempting to move up to a different level of Chinese. Compare grade school level texts with college level texts: it’s almost like reading a different language.

The same is true with English. I am a college educated native speaker who loves to read books but I still have a hard time reading early 19th century English literature (Jane Austen comes to mind). I can’t even begin to understand some of the references or allusions. Reviewing radicals are a cakewalk in comparison.

It's definitely easier for me now. As learninglife said, once you get to a comfortable level with character components, you can pick them up far more rapidly. Context helps as well – the number of words you can learn is far beyond proportionate to the number of characters you know.

That, and your increased knowledge means you can recognise more text and speech, which means you listen and read more (intentionally or otherwise), which means your learning accelerates.

I look at the Chinese New York Times every day ( http://cn.nytimes.com ), and the number of headlines and captions that I can read is growing by the week. Slowly, but noticeably.

I have a different view on this topic. It will definitely get easier to memorize how to write a character, once you have learnt a certain amount of characters. Let's say, to learn the first 500 characters is definitely more time consuming than to move from 2000 to 2500. However, I am now facing different problems: I mix up more and more similar looking characters; sometimes, it's even with very basic characters, that I am not sure whether it's the old "basic" character or another similar looking, which I just recently learnt, e.g. 曾, 增, 僧, 赠, 憎, 蹭, 噌 . I had learnt all of them, but now I have to put some extra effort into distinguishing them. The second problem is, that the more I read, I am wondering, what this character means; in the beginning I just memorized the basic meaning of a character in a simple text. Now, I find simple characters in a more complex text and have to learn all the different meanings and facets of how a character can be used (e.g. 则, which can be used in many different ways, not only rule, standard, what I learnt in the first step). The 3rd problem is, that once you have learnt more characters, this means, you also have learnt characters which are not so frequently used and as such, do not appear so often in a text (or very rarely, if it is a character mostly used in names). So the amount of reviews needed might increase for such characters.
At least I can say, the problem I am facing with characters is changing over time; so I am hesitating to answer the question whether or nor it's getting easier, at least it's getting different.

I have that problem with similar characters too. I handle it by:

- creating effective mnemonics to bed down the distinction between the characters (e.g. hands for playing in 操, water for bathing in 澡)

- being very, very strict on myself in SRS – if I get the distinguishing element wrong, or even if I'm not sure, I mark it as incorrect

That's all really interesting. Thank you for answering my question.

I had a good day yesterday, where things made a lot of sense, and many new characters were compounds of old ones, or things that made me smile a little with their literal tranlations. The day before I'd had a bad day where it all seemed hard (but I was ill as well, which doesn't help), so I think I was feeling a bit down about it all.

I suppose the trick is to make the 'good' days outnumber the 'bad' ones :)