Don’t Learn to Write Chinese Characters
Good luck remembering this one (actually Japanese)
Not learning to write Chinese characters may sound like blasphemy, but in my experience learning to write them has been close to useless and probably the biggest waste of time ever.
Chinese characters are complicated. They are pictures that represent sounds and meaning. You can’t ignore Chinese characters when learning Chinese, but you can avoid having to memorize the tens of thousands of strokes it takes to build them. For a lot of people, learning Chinese characters is the top reason why they don’t learn Chinese or why they find it hard to progress in the language.
What if we simply skipped this step?
You don’t need to learn to write them
We can recognize things far easier than we can produce them. We can recognize people very easily, but we have a hard time describing them in detail to someone else. The more detail there is in an object, the harder it is for us to produce, but it may not be harder in any way to recognize.
People rarely write Chinese characters by hand. When you speak, listen, read, or even write electronically, you don’t need to know how to write Chinese characters. Writing electronically uses Pinyin, so you only have to know how to say something and then recognize the character for it, unlike spelling words in English which is used both online and offline; master Pinyin (which is a lot easier than English spelling) and you’ll be good to go. How often do you even write by hand in your native language?
I live in China and work for a Chinese company. I have had to write characters by hand only once a month, and only about 10 words for my reimbursement forms – and even those I could have just filled out on my computer and printed out if I wanted to.
Learning to write characters takes a lot of time
I actually did learn how to write Chinese by hand in school. I had to write essays in class out by hand and answers to questions on the board. I spent more time writing characters over and over again on paper than I did doing anything else during my first year learning Chinese.
Now there are methods for learning how to write Characters that don’t take this long, but you have to separate them completely from the language learning process. You could learn 2000 characters in 6 months if you learned 10 characters a day, which is a lot of time. You will also need Spaced Repetition based flashcards in order to remember what you learn, which will require a lot of reviews over those 6 months – a lot of time that you could use learning the language instead.
If you don’t use it, you lose it
Even though I spent a year writing characters, I can barely write the most commonly used words in the language without help from my phone. I never use them and didn’t upkeep them on my own, so I lost the ability to write them.
If I used an SRS program to review how to write characters every so often, I could still be able to write them all, but if you don’t learn how to write them in the first place, you can save yourself a lot of time and effort.
And yet, I don’t notice my inability to write characters at all. I never even noticed that I lost the ability to write them – it just happened in the background.
Understanding how characters are built helps in recognition
You still should understand how characters are built so you can have an easier time understanding them. Basically you just need to know what radicals are and familirize yourself with them. Some pieces of the character hint to the pronunciation, while other pieces may to the meaning. I’ll go more into that in my Guide to Chinese.
Simplified vs Traditional?
Before you had to learn to write either traditional characters or simplified characters, and if you wanted to learn to write both you had to double the work. Well now you don’t have to worry about it! It’s pretty easy to learn to recognize both at the same time.
If you absolutely must learn to write Chinese characters
Some of you may believe that learning to write characters by hand is absolutely necessary. If you do learn to write them, you should at least learn the best way to do it. Learn about mnemonics, and Heisig’s method to learning characters. Get an SRS flashcard system and use it everyday, or no amount of memorization techniques will be able to keep the information fresh.
Or you could save yourself the time and trouble and don’t learn how to write Chinese characters.
Related posts:
- How I learned Chinese in only 2 years
- How to learn a language part #2: Set up for success 1-3
- How to Learn a Language Part 3: Early Game
- How to learn a language part #2: Set up for success 4-7
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