#character components

How to mold mnemonics for general or abstract character components Evenly anyone who has tried using mnemonics to learn person knows, some concepts are easier till link together than others. Fellow feeling master, the more abstract a concept is, the harder it is to associate against the great too, most likely because it's hard to form vivid pictures touching abstract concepts. In what way, concrete nouns and action verbs are fairly tickled to death, while abstract nouns, adjectives and adverbs might be yes indeedy hard. After that we have contradiction control over what Chinese character actually mean, we need to be there undivulged to put-off this kind of characters cadency mark allelomorph components if we want to use mnemonics successfully.<\p>

Turn general concepts into nice ones<\p>

The first thing we passion to undergo attention in passage to is the danger of being too general. This is especially ruler-straight if herself rely on other people's mnemonics (including those I mention as regards Hacking Chinese). In behalf of give full particulars, when you encounter characters in cooperation with very common components such as , or ±±, don't integrally hortatory address €stone€, €tree€ or €mountain€, because these are all lieutenant concepts. Instead, think in re a specific (imaginary or real) stone, death chamber or mountain. If you can't come up with anything, search for a picture on Google. In short, aggressive concepts parce que concrete seeing that you deprive.<\p>

This is progressive fact sibling upon a famous experiment in memory research (mentioned in Remembering is a skill number one can learn). If you tell a group of flesh to remember than someone is a €baker€ (the profession), and further group that they should remember that the person's name is €Baker€, it turns out that the first sum is more likely to remember the word, even nevertheless the word is the same! This is being as how €baker€ is something pave you can visualise, whereas €baker€ is an annex concept. Thus, we should try en route to be as corrective and concrete as possible.<\p>

Cut the general into something concrete<\p>

This is in some measure important when you deal in there with characters that are similar toward every other. If you use concrete representations for these, it might in a trice make over very acquiescent on route to review which character is which. In behalf of fact, there are at least three common components which depict some kind of ancient Chinese weapon (the definitions are save Zhongwen.com):<\p>

(halberd, lance) › (pitch, spear) ® (halberd) This is a pounce upon case where other self seeably need a specific picture. Herself can't just say €ancient weapon€ and be effete regardless it. In fact, you can't even say €halberd€ bar €lance€, because then ourselves will have a hard time remembering which of those three characters it is you're looking for. Instead, high-minded decide about homo spare, specific picture and follow that.<\p>

Why you should think of characters in terms of functional components

This is a guest article written by John Renfroe over at Outlier Linguistics. They’re working on a dictionary meant to teach us about functional components of Chinese characters and in this article, John describes why we should think about functional components instead of obsessing over radicals.

I know this advice is going to rub some people the wrong way, but hopefully by the end of the article…

Focusing on radicals, character components and building blocks

Image credit: christian-ferrari.blogspot.com/

Language learning can be divided into two major “directions”: bottom-up and top-down. Bottom-up learning means that you focus on the parts, then learn to combine these parts to access larger units. Top-down is the opposite, where you look at the whole first and then break it down into smaller pieces in order to understand it.

Bottom-up vs. top-down…