I turned on definition practice a while ago and have been trying quite hard, but it has become quite frustrating.

Some of the individual characters' definitions are so long and full of unrelated/contradictory things as to be absurd. For example, 处 apparently means both "get on with" and "punish", and 干 has about five million meanings.

How are other people dealing with this? Do you actually try to memorize all the meanings of 干? Or do you only practice the definitions of multi-character words (which seem to have more specific meanings)?

James

As long as I learn/know the meaning that is relevant to me, I don't care about other meanings the character might have.

Or isn't that what you were asking ? :-)

In many situations a majority of the definitions listed are all near synonms of each other.

处: to reside; to live; to dwell; to be in; to be situated at...etc (apparently Chinese dictionaries are also thesauruses)

So what I normally try to do is pick one and stick with it, especially when I can derive the other definitions from it. Actually I remember the Heisig keyword for that one was "location". I have also noticed that for hanzi that are most commonly associated with specific words they will just throw in that definition of the word just for good measure?

I do not generally beat myself up over not getting the exact definition of an isolated character. If I am somewhat in the ballpark of the idea behind it then it is alright with me. I have noticed as I see them used in words I develop a greater sense of the hanzi anyways.

I'm pretty much the same as above. Associate one particular keyword with that character. Generally one of the definitions offered will be a little more unusual than the rest.

One of the things I am learning from Skritter is a Zen-like contemplation of how I learn. There is also a philosophical contemplation of what my goals are about learning.

I tried out the definition practice a while ago and immediately turned it off because I couldn't stand the fact that I wasn't actively entering content and that the answers were so all over the map. I think this is a flaw with the definitions as they are right now because the right way to learn the subsidiary meanings is via the words that contain the characters with the corresponding meaning. A lot of the characters are phonetically used in many cases and the 'meaning' seems to be inherited from the compound.

I have just turned definitions back on with the understanding that 'If I get the pronunciation with tone and the first definition correct -- then I will say CORRECT'.

I haven't made much progress with definitions since this change because I have tightened up the criteria I use for judging writing a character correctly; this is forcing a review of about a couple of hundred characters.

The answer I have to my Zen-like quest is that I imagine a hypothetical context where I would like to be able to produce the knowledge and define CORRECT as in those terms. I can't ever imagine a context where I would want to produce all of the definitions as they are now.

My personal view is the opposite: learn popular characters (meaning+writing) to help learn words en mass, which will in turn reinforce the characters (pronunciation). It's working pretty well.

Sticking with one meaning per character (although for many I know more, as they're worked into mnemonics), it is certainly possible to learn characters like this. I've added over 600 in the past month.

Along those lines, what would happen if I were to click the "delete" button on a definition page? Would it delete just the definition, or would it also delete the writing and tone practice?

James

I use the definition practice to affirm that I actually recognize those words and characters that I am learning to write, that I am able to exercise my knowledge in the other direction (character to def'n, not just pinyin/meaning to character). Your question applies more to the individual characters, I think, since the words generally have reasonably constrained meanings.

So, given that a character may show up in different words with sometimes vastly different meanings as a component, they get those "long and full of unrelated/contradictory things as to be absurd" definitions. However, I do not know all of the words that character is a component of right now, so I am not interested in memorizing the long list. I want to be able to see a word or character and recognize it in the context of what I have already learned. I believe those other meanings will be added as my word vocabulary grows.

I guess that's about what others have said...

Agree with the above. I usually associate one key definition with the character and mark it correct if I get that word.

I have been doing more practice recently and so have noticed another difficulty with definitions practice and wonder if others have noticed it...and what they think about it. I am finding that some new words are appearing in definition practice first. Then a few minutes later it asks me to practice the character. The problem with that is that then I usually get the characters of the word right even though I might not really know the word. Since it marks it correct, I suppose that influences how soon it appears again, thus influences my learning.

For me, I don't think this is good for my learning. However, I can see that for some, particularly for beginners this would be useful.

Is there anyway to turn the definition practice off until the character has appeared in character writing practice?

Or even just spacing things out a bit more would work well.

We actually try to keep the definitions short! I just grade myself based on whether I knew the definition(s) useful to me, even if it's just one of many. In the future you'll be able to edit your personal definitions to reflect that, if you want.

Delete button on practice page deletes all parts for that word, not just the ones you're being prompted for.

I'm still working on getting the spacing of different parts of new words to work properly. Definition practice shouldn't come first, but sometimes it does. I want it to come after a few hours or the next day.

It appears from the responses that nobody actually tries to learn the complete definitions when they're long and random.

@nick - I didn't know you had tried to shorten the definitions, but I think it's really an impossible problem for many characters which have multiple meanings.

Think about the English word "blue". Depending on context, it can mean the color, a bent or altered musical note, the North during the Civil War, Democratic as opposed to Republican, etc. So when Chinese people study English, should they try to learn all those meanings based on just the word "blue"? No, because then they won't know which contexts signal which meanings.

It would be much more useful, assuming they actually cared about learning all those meanings, to learn them in the context of phrases which illustrated the different meanings, e.g. "Obama turned several red states blue".

So, my take on all this is that if we really want to learn all the meanings of 干 we should do it by learning multi-character words and phrases that illustrate the different meanings rather than, to be blunt, wasting time with 干 in isolation. On that note, is there a custom list or textbook that has a lot of phrases? That would be pretty useful.

James

I thought I would focus this morning on a character that I have been having trouble with that is associated with the definition. The particular word is:

斥 to blame; reprove; accuse

The definitions are according to Skritter.

When I look this up in WenLin I get:

1877 斥 [chì]
排斥 páichì reject;
驳斥 bóchì,
斥责 chìzé denounce

斥 ³chì b.f.
①scold; reprimand ¹chìzé
②repel; exclude; oust chìtuì

This character is very uncommon by itself (apparently) but occurs in a number of bound forms from which is derives some contextual meaning.

Tuttle and Heisig disagree and struggle to come up with a good keyword.

Tuttle: drive out
Heisig new: reprimand
Heisig old: reject

Wieger has:
to attack a man in his house; to expel, to turn out of the house, to scold, to strike or cuff.

This 'meaning' is based on the etymology of character and is really obsolete but as good as any other.

Following James (jww1066) I feel a frustration that the 'meaning' of this character is very elusive and that when I am learning it I just need some kind of handle that I can use to trigger the production of the correct graphic. I can later learn all of the contexts where this character takes on particular meaning.

I feel a strong need in these kind of situations to be able to set my own definition but for the time being I will use 'to blame' as a keyword even though none of the references above agree with that one.

-- Howard

Pretty sure they said they would bring in your own definitions at some point.

For me personally though:
斤 is "Mr T" (for obvious reasons).
斥 is "Mr T blames no-one for slashing his face".
言 simplification looks like an i, so that's an information point. So:
诉 "Mr T _tells_ the information desk he blames no-one for slashing his face".

Silly? Yes. But easy to remember the definition and structure.

And words fall in place after that.

Yeah, custom definitions are still coming. We figured we'd really need those for active definition practice, but since we're probably going to stick with passive definition practice, we should see about getting them going.

James, I don't know of an especially phraseful list. We do have a bunch of plans revolving on example sentences and sentence practice. The ideal method would be to practice whole sentences, but to do so in a way where you can tell which words are hard so that you can keep practicing those in different contexts. A bit of a trick to do, but we've many ideas.