Hacking Chinese

A better way of learning Mandarin

Articles tagged with ‘Functional components’

  1. Outlier Chinese Character Masterclass review: Understand more, learn faster, remember longer

    Mastering Chinese characters, whether you find them enchantingly beautiful or overwhelmingly complex, is essential for literacy in Chinese. Outlier Linguistics will help you understand how the Chinese writing system works, making it easier to learn!

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  2. 5 levels of understanding Chinese characters: Superficial forms to deep structure

    How much do you need to care about the actual composition and meaning of a Chinese character when learning it? In general, better understanding means it’s easier to learn, but is there a limit to how closely you should stick to actual etymology? This article explores the spectrum from using superficial images to real etymology from the perspective of a language learner.

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  3. Learn Chinese character meaning and pronunciation together

    Phonetic components in Chinese characters

    A large majority of all Chinese characters look the way they do because of how they are pronounced. You can use this to your benefit if you learn Chinese character meaning and pronunciation together.

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  4. Why you should think of characters in terms of functional components

    Learning about the structure of Chinese characters can help enormously when learning the language. This article is an in-depth look at functional components, i.e. parts of characters that give the whole character either its meaning or its sound. It’s also a discussion about why we really shouldn’t talk so much about radicals when learning Chinese.

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