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.

How to Start Learning Chinese Characters

1. Start with easy characters that look like their meaning:

人[rén] person 口[kǒu] mouth 木[mù] tree

2. Then you can learn the multiple characters

从[cóng] from 众[zhòng] crowd 品[pǐn] article 森[sēn] wooded 林[lín] wood

3. Then learn combinations of the characters you have learned

人口[rénkǒu] population 森林[sēnlín] forest

4. Learn characters using combinations of the graphic elements you have learned.

杏 [xìng] apricot

5. As you learn new characters play games with them. Practice spotting them in texts and compare new characters with ones you already know. Look at the differences and similarities.

6. At first characters may seem difficult, but don't despair. As you learn more you will find that the graphic elements start to repeat or new characters will be similar to ones you already know. For example we can take the character 人and add a horizontal line through the middle to get 大[dà] meaning big. Imagine a man holding his arms out to demonstrate that something is big, like a fisherman explaining the enormous fish he has just caught.