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Currently viewing the tag: "Character components"
Mnemonics are really cool, but you shouldn’t overuse them. Chinese characters are very complex and the amount of information you might want to remember about them is large. Creating mnemonics for everything is very time consuming and difficult. Instead of doing this, create mnemonics only for things you actually find hard to remember.
It’s easy and perhaps natural to spend the minimum amount of effort to overcome a problem, but this will bring problems in the long run. If we want to reach long-term goals such as mastering Chinese, we need to adopt a long-term approach. What makes sense to pass your next exam isn’t necessarily what makes sense if you want to really learn what you’re studying.
If you plan to learn to read or write Chinese, you will need to learn parts of characters (components) and parts of words (characters). There are an untold number of combinations of these, and if you only study these it will be impossible. This would be a little bit like learning maths by studying thousands of examples, but never actually looking at the underlying equations.
