Graphic element recognition exercise

Here is an example of a graphic element recognition exercise:

Spot the odd one out in each line:

口口中口

扌扌扌亅

How to build your vocabulary and learn radicals

Once you've learnt a few basic elements of characters you can start putting them together in different ways to make other characters and combining characters to make words like 人口(population). You'll need to work on learning the radicals. There is a complete list on Wikipedia:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Index:Chinese_radical

Start with the easier ones with fewer strokes and gradually work your way through the list using the learning techniques I've outlined before. The radicals are used in Chinese dictionaries to index the characters in the dictionary. You'll need to learn how to count the number of strokes in a character for that.

Which character is the same as English?

Answer=〇 meaning zero. The Roman numerals 1-9 are also used by Chinese in dates etc. and all Chinese people know them as well as the Chinese numerals. They also know most letters of the alphabet but especially older people may not be very good at pinyin. (By the way there is another character for zero 零 but don't worry too much about that one for the time being)

回 huí return

What could be easier than this character? A square within a square and what does it mean? Return, (go, come) back

又 yòu again

This is an easy character to write and it's a very useful character. Then you can write another character 友 [yǒu] which means friend as in péngyou. There are a whole lot of characters incorporating this graphic element and I've plotted them on a character map. Contact me for more details. christophermccoll@yahoo.co.uk

山 mountain

Imagine a range of mountains with the one in the middle higher than the other two. Then we can combine this character with ones we've already learnt to make:

山口 shānkǒu=mountain pass

山林 shānlín=mountain forest

The logic and word order is often the same as in English.

Learning Strategies for Learning Chinese Characters

1. "Train your brain" to recognise:

- Common features.
- Small differences.
- Component elements.

e.g.温=氵+曰+皿

Methodologies:

1.1 Identifying a given graphic element within the overall appearance of characters. ("Graphic element recognition exercises")

1.2 Differentiating similar graphic elements. ("Graphic element differentiation exercises")

1.3 Differentiating similar characters. ("Similar character differentiation exercises")

2. Learn meanings of graphic elements (meaningful ones) e.g.氵=water (-Geographical water features (nouns)) ("Meaning-graphic correlation exercises")

3. Learn to identify phonetic elements of characters e.g. 召[zhào]>chao/shao/zhao etc. ("Graphic-phonetic correlation exercises")

4. Adopt a logical learning sequence, starting with simple characters and accumulating graphical knowledge, but at the same time paying attention to the relative frequency of use of characters.
e.g. Learn 日before 是

5. Learn graphically similar characters together.

e.g. Learn 力 and 九 together.