- Welcome!
- Blog (recent articles)
- Ask a question
- HC elsewhere
- Archive
- Beginner
- Intermediate
- Advanced
- Attitude and mentality
- Key study hacks
- Organising and planning
- Learning outside class
- Learning in class
- Immersion and integration
- Distinctively Chinese
- Recommended resources
- Science and research
- Listening
- Speaking
- Reading
- Writing
- Vocabulary
- Essential articles
- Twitter archive
- About
Currently viewing the tag: "Sensible character learning"
The sensible character challenge has now been running for two weeks and it’s time to see how things have been going so far. This post is a progress report that contains some reflections on the challenge itself, as well as some practical advice on how to solve common problems. It also invites participants to share their experience and progress so far.
Contrary to what many people believe, a good memory can be trained. Memory champions are just ordinary people who have practised a lot. There are many clever techniques and tricks you can use to remember things (such as Chinese characters or words) very efficiently. This article is meant to be an introduction for those of you who are new to the fascinating world of memory training.
This is a challenge designed to help students break the bad habit of simply repeating characters over and over until they stick and instead rely on more clever and efficient methods. It’s about learning for the long term and learning to really understand the characters. Will you join the challenge?
My conclusion after five years of learning characters is that rote learning is useless. Spaced repetition software is good, but it’s still not enough. If adult foreigners are going to learn to write Chinese by hand, we really need another method. We need mnemonics, we need active processing, we need to quit rote learning and stop using SRS mechanically.
