Learning Chinese Characters

I am trying to figure out the best way for me to build up a personal vocabulary list in Chinese that I could regularly practice reviewing. About fifteen years ago, I had memorized about 1,700 characters whose writing, meaning and pronunciation I knew. I would practice writing them down from memory once a week. I had arranged them in the alphabetical order of their Romanized “pinyin” transliterations. I did this weekly review for several years, but realized that I wasn’t making the headway in actually learning the language that I wanted. For one, although each Chinese character is technically considered to be a “word”, what we in English would call a “word” is often (if not usually) a compound of two (or more) characters in Chinese. Hence just knowing of a character in a compound Chinese word, although it can give a clue to the word’s meaning, comes up short when trying to understand a text written in Chinese. There are also much more than 1,700 characters in Chinese, so I am continually confronted with strange characters that I have to stop and look up in a dictionary. And if this weren’t enough, Chinese now has two forms of writing: the Traditional (still used in Taiwan and over much of the world) and Simplified (used throughout mainland China and Hong Kong). Almost all of the dictionaries available in bookstores nowadays use the Simplified characters.

I am making it a personal project of mine to expand the list of characters I am memorizing (and reviewing) to a substantially higher number, while including the most common compounds used with each character as well as their Simplified forms. I’m also considering memorizing each character’s “radical” number to help me look them up in more traditional Chinese dictionaries, as well as to help me find them on certain websites that enable me to type out Chinese characters. From time to time, I’ll post my progress with this ambitious endeavor on this blog.