How to remember Chinese characters
Characters look impossible at first. How they're built, why learning them inside words helps, and the memory techniques that make them stick.
Hanzi put more people off Mandarin than anything else. There are thousands of them, and many look alike. They get much easier once you see how they’re built, and once you learn them the way you’ll use them, inside words.
How characters are built
Most characters are made of smaller parts that turn up again and again. Many of them combine a part that hints at the meaning with a part that hints at the sound.
- 妈 (mā, mother) is 女 (woman) for the meaning, plus 马 (mǎ, horse) for the sound.
- 饭 (fàn, cooked rice, a meal) is 饣 (food) plus 反 (fǎn) for the sound.
- 河 (hé, river) is 氵 (water) plus 可 (kě).
The hints aren’t always exact, but once you know a few hundred common parts, a new character stops being a random shape. You see 氵 and think water; you see 马 and think “ma”.
Learn characters inside words
Most Mandarin words are two characters, and you need the words anyway. Learning 米饭 (mǐfàn, rice) teaches you 米 and 饭 at the same time, with a meaning you can picture and a sound you’ll actually hear. When 饭 turns up again in 早饭 (zǎofàn, breakfast), you already know it.
Start with the most frequently used words. They contain the most common characters, so each one you learn keeps turning up in words you learn later.
Make each one memorable
A story from the parts
Many learners give each part a fixed meaning and turn the parts of a character into a little scene. 休 (xiū, to rest) is a person 亻 leaning against a tree 木: picture yourself resting against a tree on a hot day. Images where the things interact are remembered better than images of the same things side by side (Wollen et al., 1972).
A picture of the word
For a whole word, picture what it means, and put something in the scene that sounds like it. Then the picture brings back the sound as well as the meaning. 米饭: “fàn” sounds like “fan”, so picture a fan blowing over your bowl of rice. That’s the keyword method, one of the best-studied memory tricks for foreign words (Atkinson & Raugh, 1975). See memory hooks.
Tones in the picture
Each character has a tone, and tones slip first. Giving each tone a colour, and putting that colour in the picture, ties the tone to the memory. See how to remember Chinese tones.
Reading or writing?
Decide early whether you want to write characters by hand, or mainly read them. Many learners mostly type, using pinyin to pick the character on screen, so they put reading first. Writing by hand takes much more practice per character, and it’s worth doing for the characters you care about.
Keep them with spaced reviews
However you learn a character, it will fade without reviews. With spaced repetition, you’re tested on each one just before you’d forget it, at gaps that grow from days to months (Cepeda et al., 2006). See how spaced repetition works.
How Flashfriend does it
Flashfriend teaches characters through words, most useful first. Each word card shows the characters large, with every character coloured by its tone, and pinyin and audio for how it sounds. You pick a place and a scene, and Flashfriend paints a picture with a sound-alike hook in it, so 米饭 gets its fan. Once you know enough words, you read the same characters again in sentences, and grammar arrives one pattern at a time.
Flashfriend teaches you to read, hear and use Mandarin. It doesn’t teach handwriting, so if you want to write characters by hand, add a stroke-order app.
Read more about Flashfriend for Mandarin.
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