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Currently viewing the tag: "Words"
Many people regard chengyu as the golden key to the Chinese language and believe that learning chengyu will impress native speakers and take their Chinese to the next level. However, learning chengyu in the wrong way is likely to have the opposite effect (“oh, the foreigner is trying to use chengyu, how cute!”). Focus should be on chengyu that are truly useful and frequently used, the rest should be left for those who really like chengyu or for truly advanced students.
The normal thing to do when we learning characters or words is to focus on deepening our knowledge, researching components and understanding more about what we’re trying to learn. Some problems can’t be alleviated this way, however, instead they call for horizontal vocabulary learning, i.e. to putting the character or word into context and to compare it with similar characters or words. Only then can we grasp the bigger picture.
After spending two articles building up our toolkit to learn Chinese more efficiently, the time is now ripe to actually use all these to something genuinely useful. It’s time to make those long-term investments pay off. This article explains how to learn new words really fast.
This is the second article in my series on creating a toolkit to enable efficient learning of words and this time the topic is individual characters. This article explains why individual characters are important to learn and there are links to other articles describing how to learn characters efficiently.
