4 ms·

Thanks for the info. I've been learning now for about a year, and text is definitely my weak spot. I see handwritten chinese and it frequently looks nothing lik

by vacri 9y ago

Thanks for the info. I've been learning now for about a year, and text is definitely my weak spot. I see handwritten chinese and it frequently looks nothing like the nice, crisp computer fonts (which are hard enough just by themselves) - not so much that it's messy, but that I often just simply can't see how you make out the elements. I find it amazing that not only do native chinese speakers recognise thousands of characters, but also wild handwritten variants, and also the same again in simplified/traditional. I once lightheartedly asked my teacher if exercise books in china had bigger gaps between the lines, as I couldn't see how to fit a vertically-complex hanzi in. She wandered over and scrawled something that neatly fit in the line. "How the hell did you do that... ?" :)

imron 9y ago
> Thanks for the info. I've been learning now for about a year, A year is probably still too early to be able to read handwriting well. You probably need to have about 2,000 known characters under your belt and also have a good feel for the language such that you are able to fill in gaps based on context - that is be able to complete parts of the sentence based on knowledge of what words/characters are likely to fit. There are many cursive characters that reduce to something quite similar so having knowledge of what fits in the sentence makes things easier. As an example, with 王 above, by itself it might not look like anything you can recognise, but if it was written like that on a note starting out like 尊敬的王老师 then from context it narrows down the possibilities significantly. > She wandered over and scrawled something that neatly fit in the line. "How the hell did you do that... ?" :) Practice! It's one thing to know how to write a character, it's another thing to have the fine motor skills required to write it proportionally within a confined space, and you can only develop that skill through practice. If you're interested, one of my side projects [0] is a site that lets you generate custom Chinese worksheets of varying grid sizes and fonts (including some handwriting fonts) and other things, which can be useful for such practice. 0: https://www.hanzigrids.com/ https://www.hanzigrids.com/
- vacri 9y ago
  A year is definitely too early - I'm a middling student at it (and weak at text), and would be lucky to get 100 characters by sight. As you say though, it's all about practice, and I need to apply some "bum glue" (to quote Stephen King) and just sit down and do it. A Chinese colleague of mine said that throughout high school, he had nightly homework of 6 new characters, pretty much every night. Ouch! Thanks for the link - it will help and I've been meaning to look for one (phone apps with your finger aren't quite the same).
  - imron 9y ago
    > A Chinese colleague of mine said that throughout high school, he had nightly homework of 6 new characters, pretty much every night. Ouch! 'Pretty much every night' is the most important part. Learning Chinese characters is a grind and you just need to keep chipping away at it. Pick a nice sustainable number of characters (maybe 6, maybe 3, maybe 10 but something that takes maybe 30 minutes to an hour to do including revision) and then do it every day without fail. Number of days in a row spent learning is far more important than number of new words learnt per day, so always try to optimise for the former rather than the latter. At some point, almost every Chinese learner who has spent more than 3 years learning the language has looked back and thought 'why oh why didn't I just learn 3 characters a day'.

by vacri 9y ago

imron 9y ago

> Thanks for the info. I've been learning now for about a year, A year is probably still too early to be able to read handwriting well. You probably need to have about 2,000 known characters under your belt and also have a good feel for the language such that you are able to fill in gaps based on context - that is be able to complete parts of the sentence based on knowledge of what words/characters are likely to fit. There are many cursive characters that reduce to something quite similar so having knowledge of what fits in the sentence makes things easier. As an example, with 王 above, by itself it might not look like anything you can recognise, but if it was written like that on a note starting out like 尊敬的王老师 then from context it narrows down the possibilities significantly. > She wandered over and scrawled something that neatly fit in the line. "How the hell did you do that... ?" :) Practice! It's one thing to know how to write a character, it's another thing to have the fine motor skills required to write it proportionally within a confined space, and you can only develop that skill through practice. If you're interested, one of my side projects [0] is a site that lets you generate custom Chinese worksheets of varying grid sizes and fonts (including some handwriting fonts) and other things, which can be useful for such practice. 0: https://www.hanzigrids.com/ https://www.hanzigrids.com/

vacri 9y ago
A year is definitely too early - I'm a middling student at it (and weak at text), and would be lucky to get 100 characters by sight. As you say though, it's all about practice, and I need to apply some "bum glue" (to quote Stephen King) and just sit down and do it. A Chinese colleague of mine said that throughout high school, he had nightly homework of 6 new characters, pretty much every night. Ouch! Thanks for the link - it will help and I've been meaning to look for one (phone apps with your finger aren't quite the same).
- imron 9y ago
  > A Chinese colleague of mine said that throughout high school, he had nightly homework of 6 new characters, pretty much every night. Ouch! 'Pretty much every night' is the most important part. Learning Chinese characters is a grind and you just need to keep chipping away at it. Pick a nice sustainable number of characters (maybe 6, maybe 3, maybe 10 but something that takes maybe 30 minutes to an hour to do including revision) and then do it every day without fail. Number of days in a row spent learning is far more important than number of new words learnt per day, so always try to optimise for the former rather than the latter. At some point, almost every Chinese learner who has spent more than 3 years learning the language has looked back and thought 'why oh why didn't I just learn 3 characters a day'.