<p>Hi,
I’m taking a Chinese course in school now, but the characters are too hard to remember. To Chinese readers, how do you remember Chinese characters? Aren’t they supposed to resemble the object they describe? What about abstract things like color, emotion, feelings etc?</p>
<p>You can take apart some words and look at each part separately, and that helps. </p>
<p>Remember the radicals and such; they help a lot with meanings. And sometimes the pronunciations are similar if the rest of the word is the same (but different radicals). </p>
<p>I remember having to write the words over and over again with the zhuyin (Taiwanese ftw) for practice until I memorized them.</p>
<p>But I don’t really know what it’s like for nonnative speakers…</p>
<p>what about the radicals?</p>
<p>The bushou things
They help soo much! Every word has one, and it would be wise to know them.
(But I learned traditional Chinese, so I don’t know anything about simplified. Simplified Chinese is weird.)</p>
<p><a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_character[/url])”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_character)</a></p>
<p>oh…
But, I never understand when they;'re used… could you explain more?</p>
<p>The bushous are a part of each character for example in 嗎 the radical is 口, which is associated with “mouth.” 嗎 is a word that goes at the end of some questions. For 媽, which means mother (well 媽媽 does), the radical is 女, which means “female.”</p>
<p>Word associated with talking/mouths sometimes have 口 as a bushou. Words associated with females or feminine things often have 女 as a bushou.</p>
<p>Not all words… in fact… i doubt more than half of the words look like what they’re supposed to represent. It helps a lot to learn the radicals and what they represent/are associated with. A lot of times, there’s nothing more that you can do than just copy the words over until it sticks in your head :</p>
<p>Some of the characters make sense. They paint the picture they are describing. For example, the character qi 氣 means air. And if you look at it, it’s like a rice cooker, with steam blowing out of it. And the steam is air. In simplified, it’s 气, which kinda looks like air too if you squint your eyes and tilt your head. 
But in all seriousness, it’s just a matter of practice, like any other language. I bet as you are typing your response to CC forums, you don’t think about how to spell every single word do you? It just comes naturally because you used that word so much. You recognize what that word looks like. And especially true in english, sometimes words don’t spell the same way they are said, so how do you remember how to spell something? Is it a “ph” or a “f” is there a silent “e” or no? This is the same thing with chinese. Don’t expect to be able to do it immediately. English probably took a few years to get the basics right? And even today, you are learning new words and how to spell them.
It’s not a matter of memorization, but habituation. :)</p>
<p>I like writing them over and over again until I memorize the character. One thing I did was make a picture using characters. For example I wrote 飞机 to fill in a picture of an airplane. It seriously works really well.</p>
<p>Learning to write in Chinese characters won’t come as easily as, say, French or any of the other languages that share roots and phonetics and letters.</p>
<p>I really liked WaterTastesGood’s reply…especially on the squinting and rice cooker example lol</p>
<p>Hey I’m in Chinese 3, I’d say there are different strategies best suited for different people. I would try a couple different ways and see which works best. </p>
<p>If I were to offer a suggestion though I would highly ** HIGHLY ** recommend the book “Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters”. I struggled for the longest time with memorizing characters before I found this book, but it really did do wonders. </p>
<p>Best of luck!</p>
<p>Does anyone have a web page that tells all the radicals/ roots of Chinese words? I think that might help</p>
<p>[List</a> of Chinese Radicals (Bushou)](<a href=“http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/radicals.php]List”>List of Chinese Radicals (Bushou))</p>
<p>Purchase “Remember the Hanzi”.</p>
<p>Nobody remember ALL the characters. Nobody.</p>
<p>That doesn’t mean you can’t remember a whole lot of them. Break each one down to its separate parts; Practice writing them repeatedly.</p>
<p>Learn your radicals, and remember that 80% of Chinese characters are variations of a base character. </p>
<p>I feel so bad for nonnative speakers.</p>
<p>I had that problem too when I first took Chinese. Unlike most of my friends, who’ve already had a couple of years of Chinese schooling, I struggled with memorizing characters. It was to the point where my teacher confronted me and said that she would have given me a failing grade if it were not for my diligence (I really did try in that class). </p>
<p>However, the summer after freshman year, I was super motivated and decided to memorize all the characters that were covered. And so I did that, and, surprisingly, it got so much easier to memorize characters. I’m not kidding. </p>
<p>Once I found the perfect studying method, which was writing down the pinyin of the characters on a sheet of paper and trying to ‘test’ myself like a real test, Chinese was pretty easy to me, though I still struggle with grammar structures. Right now, I’m in honors Chinese with an A. 
I suggest you try out different methods of studying Chinese characters to determine which suits you best.</p>
<p>It’s exactly as how English people know the meanings of English words. You read a lot.
Though it’s a bit different with Chinese, in Chinese, if you can read the word, in most cases you’ll know what it means too. In English, you can pronounce a word to death and still not know what it means. I’ve been reading historical references lately and I find that you can sound out difficult words through their parts. Anyways, off topic. Your question is how to remember how they are “spelled”. Same answer, read read read.</p>
<p>And the whole “it’s supposed to look like what it means”, that was true way back before the evolution of traditional Chinese characters so it might help if you’re studying 甲骨文(jia gu wen), 金文(jin wen) or even 篆书(zhuan shu) (all old forms of Chinese characters) but it won’t help you today unfortunately.</p>