Learning New Chinese Characters

Lately I have been working to increase my knowledge of Chinese characters. While doing this I am also learning Japanese kanji, which are just Chinese characters adapted to the Japanese language.

Years ago, I once went through the extensive Defrancis Chinese textbook series published by Yale University Press. In doing so, I learned about 1,700 characters, which I memorized and still review on a weekly basis to this day. Later I picked up about 1,500 more new characters by reading various texts in Chinese, although these I have unfortunately allowed myself to forget for the large part over the years. Now I am adding them to the 1,700, along with Chinese characters used in Japanese kanji, for additional memorization.

My intent is to be able to fluently read Chinese (and eventually Japanese) without having to go through the arduous process of having to consult a character dictionary a couple of times or more for every sentence I stumble through. Even after increasing my vocabulary, I'll keep coming upon new unknown characters to look up. But at least that shouldn't distract too much from the flow of my reading.

My blog entries recently have been more sparse, largely due to the fact that I am spending much of the time I would have used to write my entries instead to study the additional Chinese/Japanese characters. But it sure is fun!