Language strategists pls help---it's about Chinese. My weak point was always vocab, vocab, vocab... and recognising the characters.
So, /lang/ I have a wonderful list of Chinese characters here, namely the 3000 most commonly used (that Jun Da-list); I have a neat vocab-program to drill through the list. I also have a 3000 entries long word list of contemporary Chinese vocabulary. The difference is: one list contains the single characters, the other contains the bigram words (with two characters).
Which one should I learn first?
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Anonymous2009-10-05 7:08
Learn the two-character words first. You'll effectively remember single characters by just remembering compound words. At least that worked well for me in Japanese.
Also I suggest learning traditional rather than simplified, as it gives better understanding of how characters evolved.
Learn both simultaneously. That's how we learn Chinese.
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Anonymous2009-10-07 0:43
learn the radicals. helps a ton when you can just say "oh, this char is made of the much smaller and more manageable characters."
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Anonymous2009-10-07 15:53
>>2 >>5
Agree with learning radicals, and disagree with learning traditional first. Instead I recommend learning both, with a focus on writing whichever you will be using more to more in your day to day life, and just reading the other set.
Are great, because they have both simplified and traditional variants, and they include both types of words you are describing. Mnemosyne is my spaced-repetition flashcard program of choice :3
Also, I know it sounds dumb, but chatting online is a great way to learn vocab, especially vocab that is actually used.
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Anonymous2009-10-07 18:34
Why bother torturing yourself. Chinese is an inferior and primitive language anyway.
No grammar to let you be precise about what you're saying, not even plurals, and only one tense for verbs.
Awful phonetics (lol tones), that make you sound retarded, and mean you have to say a word a certain way, every time, not allowing for sarcasm, emphasis, etc. In fact there is not even a Chinese word for sarcasm; it doesn't exist in Chinese.
No alphabet. ...
I could go on, but basically this is a primitive language inferior to every European language, and to top it off, it's much harder to learn.
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Anonymous2009-10-07 21:36
>>7
Have you tried Classical Chinese? It's 2 in 1: sophisticated grammar + sophisticated vocabulary versus just the sophisticated vocabulary in Mandarin. Also it doesn't really have any phonetics associated with it, meaning you can speak it even in the Japanese on'yomi.