I’ve been in China for a little under 5 months now, and here are some of my top study tips for learning Chinese. Learning a language is also one of most worthwhile things you can do, and it can be extremely rewarding. It’s easy to get overwhelmed and discouraged when studying any language, but especially Chinese, since it’s so different from English.īut don’t give up! Practicing Calligraphy at LTL Shanghai
You want tips on How to Learn Chinese (for 2021)? We’ve got the answers here, with tips, tricks and plenty more for you.įor a native English speaker like myself, Chinese is a very intimidating language!Įspecially if you’ve never studied a language like Chinese before. It often helps to look at the traditional version to see the origins of a character.įor example, the simplified character 东 (dōng) meaning ‘east’ doesn’t really help us find meaning, whereas looking at the traditional character, 東 will help you deduce meaning and create a story.The Truth on How To Learn Chinese with LTL in 2021 When I say ‘meaning,’ there are times when this will only be a mere hint, and the origins of these characters (depending on the person) may need to be studied in more detail in order to understand it fully. Radicals generally provide you with the ‘meaning’ of a character, or sometimes the pronunciation. Still, once you have learned around one-quarter of these radicals, you might want to continue learning the remainder simultaneously with the characters in the step below. There are approximately 214 radicals in Chinese, which may seem a lot. Learning radicals is probably the next best step because after learning the pictographs, characters begin to get bigger and slightly more complex, but NOT impossible! No, not the revolutionary type, the ones that we like to call the ‘building-blocks’ of Chinese characters. Of course, you can learn radicals first, but pictographs are an excellent ‘unscary’ introduction to Chinese characters that served me well! LEARN RADICALSĪ significant step of learning to read Chinese characters is to understand radicals. The reason why I recommend learning pictographs first is that many of them are also radicals, which you also need to know. You can get started learning pictographs in ‘ Learn to Read with these 20 Chinese Pictographs’. Well, that’s the reaction I had anyway, and the realization that Chinese characters had a meaning that I could actually understand was one of the reasons why I stuck with learning to read Chinese. I had no intention of learning to read Chinese characters because back then, written Chinese looked like this: Let me take you back to 2011 when I first arrived in China. After all, they are ‘simplified.’ However, don’t forget to take a look at traditional characters, especially later down the line. The chances are that you’ll automatically choose to learn simplified characters since this is the written language used in mainland China. There are plenty of avenues to go down before being able to read, and below are some of the ‘stages’ you might want to visit while learning to read Chinese characters.īefore starting to read, you need to decide whether you’ll learn to read simplified or traditional Chinese characters. Of course, no one’s suggesting it’s an ‘easy’ journey. Once I got over the idea that learning to read Chinese was impossible, I realized how much easier my life had become in China, and how liberating it was to read even just a handful of Chinese characters. I was one of those ‘students’ if I can even call myself that, who started to learn Chinese out of necessity. Learning to read Chinese characters is something that many students of Chinese, who often just begin learning to speak, are reluctant to show interest in.
I t will only take 11 minutes to read this post!