Hi there

I am trying to think of the best way of learning more vocabulary. I don't really want to learn many more characters at this stage, but would rather learn more words and the meanings, that way when I read something i know what it means. My problem is I can read a lot of things quite easily but because i don't know the meaning then I don't understand it.

What is the best way to learn the meaning of the words without at this stage adding too many new characters. I need to try and get up to scratch with vocab rather than too many new characters.

Any ideas??

Cheers

-- Add lots of words and/or phrases that are made up of characters you already know.
-- Find a good-sized chunk of text that gives you trouble. Run through it with Zhongwen or Pera-Kun turned on and add all the words to Skritter. Study the hell out of them, then go back and reread the text.

I think I'm in the same position as you. Nowadays I add mostly words and phrases rather than characters, and on the "progress" page I am much more interested in the "words learned" chart than "characters learned".

James

Out of curiousity, how many characters do you guys think you "know?"

@jcdoss What does it mean to "know" a character? Skritter says you know a character if you can write it correctly after a 12-hour delay. By that standard, I supposedly "know" about 1,650. That's nowhere near enough to be able to read Chinese, as I am reminded every time I try.

Here are some alternative definitions of "know":

0: You recognize the character when you see it, but don't really know what it means or how it sounds.
0.5: You can write the character and/or pronounce it, but don't really know what it means or how it sounds.
1: You know one or more definitions, but don't really know how to use and/or understand it in context.
2: You know how to use and/or understand it in one or more contexts.
3: You know how to use and/or understand it in pretty much all the contexts you find it in.

By the level 2 standard, I've known "好" for years. By the level 3 standard, I still don't understand "好". I am still running into new compounds like 好像 which make me scratch my head.

In Spanish, getting to level 3 for certain troublesome words like "para" and "por" took me a couple of years of intense study and practice. And Spanish is supposedly one of the easiest languages for native English speakers, so I would assume that Chinese poses a much larger challenge.

James

I bet that almost any combination of things you study on Skritter would help you, as long as you don't add a ton of low-frequency items. I studied Chinese in college for three years and supposedly learned about 1400 characters. I really could only write about 550 and was just forgetting more and more of them. We started Skritter right after the end of that third year.

I tried to sit in on fourth year Chinese after that, but I had to quit after two months because I couldn't read well enough to even prepare for the lessons. Ouch. That was about the time that Skritter started to work okay. So I practiced for about the next year on Skritter (when it had writing and tones only), on and off, about 84 hours. Hit 2000 characters. Didn't really do any other Chinese study except for randomly having some ChinesePod on in the background sometimes.

Then I tried to sit in on fourth year Chinese again, and again I had to quit after two months. But this time, I quit because it was too easy. I could read well enough that I didn't even have to prepare for the lessons. That felt really good.

So yeah, even though my main practice mode of writing words and characters wasn't directly related to that goal of being able to read words, it still let me make a lot of progress. Recently I tried just adding high-frequency characters that I didn't know from before and I saw another increase in my reading ability. Go figure.

If you want to make a lot of progress, you might try focusing on one or two prompt types. For me, I can do tone prompts really fast, reading prompts fast, writing prompts pretty fast, and definition prompts slowly. So it wouldn't work for me to go definition-only on new words for a while. But it might for you. If you get a ton of words familiar on one aspect on Skritter, it makes it a lot easier to learn the context of those words when you see them in the wild.

jww1066 are as usually, tremendously interesting to read. I would subscribe to him, if there would be such a feature, indeed.
Because of the a transitions from Levels 1 - 2 and 3 I recently started usezhongwen.com and similar resources a lot, where you can enter character and get possible words sorted out. In that way, each character I learn, later I sort out in those resources and then add all possible words with that character. As a result I am full of 二把手 or 二把刀 (and many others) which came up for 把.
Real life result?
I go out to world, use them, and mostly get "huh?" :-O reaction. Then I show that in writing, and in 99 % percent answer here in Taiwan is - this should be used in China we do not know that.
Welcome to Chinese study :)

Rolands: in China it's the opposite - "oh, it's a taiwanese thing". Given how often this comes up, I think a lot of these things are probably said in neither place. Rather, just uncommon or antiquated dictionary entries..

@rolands: that is a broken link

oh i suspect you wanted to write use zhongwen.com instead of usezhongwen.com

sorry, found it

When I am finding a character a bit hard to remember I sometimes add a couple more words with that same character and other characters I already know.

I use www.yellowbridge.com. For every character they list words with same head/tail character by descending frequency.

I remember before here on the forums someone posted an URL to a webpage where someone had written a program to generate words using a word frequency list containing only the specific list of characters you could then enter.

I went there a few times and exported my Skritter words, pasted them there and it generated words with descending frequency containing only characters I already knew.

I forgot that webpage but perhaps someone can post it again?

@Rolands Thanks! As for learning random rare and/or archaic words, I've had similar experiences. I believe going through the dictionary and adding all the compounds you can find would qualify as "dictionary abuse". That was one of the contributing factors to my nuke several months ago.

@skritterjohan jochemb's Skritter Word Finder is here: http://huygens.functor.nl/skritter/wordlist/

Right, learning characters alone will not suffice since Chinese relies on words. Therefore there is text I can read, in that I can convert each character to a sound but it makes absolutely no sense to me and I read poorly because I don't even know which pairs are words. Skritter has helped immensely already with this kind of reading, recognizing characters. That;s the first step...

Now I too am learning far more characters than words and my favorite mechanism is children's books. The stories are simple, fun, not obtuse and short, qualities not shared by some literature I have found. I can learn and remember words with these stories far better than by non contextual means; dictionary and lists are useful but things don't stick, for me. I've created a custom list for each book and I am adding the sentences they come from as word mnemonics. (Yeah for these extra tools in Skritter!) Sorry to those who find my shared sentences like "居然她穿着睡衣踢球！(surprisingly she wore pj's to play soccer)" annoyingly silly but now I can actually use 居然 whereas before it was just another one of those x然　things.

Oh, by the way--I recently was made aware of the Chinese Breeze Graded Reader series, which have a bunch of text for you to read while controlling for the amount of characters they use. So you don't have to know a zillion characters to learn and get context for the words in them. Should be a lot easier to get started reading with them than with normal materials (or even certain children's books).

I haven't tried them myself, but Michelle typed up 8 of the books for us on Skritter. They haven't published beyond level 2 (500 characters), so it may be too easy for some, but I bet most could get use out of it.

@SkritterJohn: "When I am finding a character a bit hard to remember I sometimes add a couple more words with that same character and other characters I already know."

Ditto here. I do the exact same thing. Thanks for posting that link, jww. I'll probably make good use of it!

I also have started learning sentences now. I set up Anki with 22000 sentences from some website somewhere. I had to convert them all to traditional and I realise that causes some mistakes, but I am catching them as I go along. I wrote a little program myself to show me only sentences containing characters I already know.

Some of them are still far out difficult but it is nice to finally start to see some context. And then English->Chinese definitely is difficult and I enjoy how difficult it is because I know I am learning a lot. I can really recommend it.

(sorry to be a bit off topic)

Hey guys... about the Skritter word finder link above.

First, thanks a lot for the link!

Second, is there a way to screen for words with a particular character? I'm using CTRL-F page search function, which works, but I'd like to see a concise list of words that contain one particular Hanzi.

jcdoss: more generally, if you're just looking for words, you can go to http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php and put the character that you want between * * and hit search.

"jww1066 are as usually, tremendously interesting to read."

I agree. Same with Nick. Their insights are really profound.

About the skritter word finder at http://huygens.functor.nl/skritter/wordlist/

I dont't get much results there. Am I missing something. If I paste this for instance I get nothing, which seems strange. Anyone has any idea why?

田 tian2 field (Kangxi radical 102)
朋 peng2 friend
打 da3 to hit; to beat; to strike; to play; to type; to fight
招 zhao1 to beckon; provoke; to recruit

@plutonb I'd guess it's because there are no words that use only those specific four characters? That is, you're not going to get 朋友 or 找钱 because you didn't enter 友 or 钱.

James

Aha, I misunderstood the function completely, thought it worked like yellowbridge but the idea is to paste a complete export of all characters I know and it will combine between only those. Very good, thanks!