Learning Chinese characters by trying to break them down and understand the parts is pretty much the same idea as trying to learn English by learning the etymol

Learning Chinese characters by trying to break them down and understand the parts is pretty much the same idea as trying to learn English by learning the etymologies of words. Linguistically, it can be useful and help you draw unexpected connections, but it can also lead you into bad traps that hinder future learning. To some extent, the same applies to trying to learn individual characters as opposed to the words they are a part of. I am ethnically Chinese and grew up listening to the language. Unfortunately, I didn’t end up learning the written language that well, so these days I’m working to catch up by learning more advanced vocabulary. The thing that I needed to realize at the outset is that Chinese is actually not much different from English, if you view it at the word level and not the character level. If you stop thinking of words as being a sequence of characters which each have their own meanings, and more as a single unit, the language is a lot easier to learn IMHO. This lesson came a bit late for me. I still have trouble sometimes with words that are similar and share characters in common. I sometimes incorrectly substitute characters within words with synonyms when I can’t come up with the correct one, which renders the whole word meaningless. Don’t get too hung up on characters when learning Chinese. Learn words. Some words are one character long - but the majority are two characters. Some characters have no meaning by themselves; others have so many meanings that it’s pointless to learn them in isolation. Many characters change their pronunciations depending on what words they’re contained in.