How and why you should learn Chinese stroke order

It's really important to learn Chinese stroke order for the reasons which I'll be discussing below. I'll also be sharing with you how you can learn stroke order and link to a website which shows you how to write Chinese characters (also known as hanzi).

If you don't know what stroke order is, there's a great Wikipedia page about it.

The most complicated Chinese character actually means a type of noodle.

Why you should learn hanzi stroke order

Stroke order to remember Chinese characters

Writing hanzi consistently makes it much easier to remember how to write them. This is because you repeat the same way of writing the character and so get muscle memory. When you have muscle memory for writing a character, you remember the movement instead of the picture. This makes it much easier to remember the character exactly.

There is also a great explanation of how you unlock meaning from using correct stroke order on Chinese Musings.

Using technology to write Chinese

Chinese learners often get asked the same question: "How do you write Chinese characters on a computer". There are various ways, but one of the best is with your finger, on a touchscreen.

Computers and phones are far better at working at which character you meant if you used the correct stroke order. This is because their algorithms take the order you write the lines into account when guessing what you meant.

Stroke order increases accuracy for writing Hanzi. Image taken from http://chinesemusings.com/chinese-stroke-order/

How you should learn stroke order

Here are the rules for chinese character stroke order with examples for when this would apply;

The rules for how to write Chinese characters. Image taken from here

If you find a character which you're stuck on there's a great web resource which writes out the stroke order for you - yes-chinese.com.

Good luck!

Websites to learn Chinese vocab

Here are some great ways to learn Chinese vocab. These are good for learning characters or any other type of Chinese such as speaking.

Get over the great wall of Chinese with these tools to learn Chinese characters!

Quizlet

www.quizlet.com

Users can ;

• make their own sets
• import them from elsewhere
• use shared sets which other users have made

The site's best mode for learning a set is, of course, learn. It requires you to type in the answer which makes it active recall (more on this later). However the flaw with learn is that there is no way to go through the set in any way other than all at once - and as a one of. This isn't practical or efficient for big card sets.

Options for accents and advice for typing in characters make it quick to create decks. As the site is so popular there are lots of shared decks.

Anki

Anki is a free program. It uses 2 great scientific techniques to make it really easy to learn the flashcards you add to it.

• Active recall testing. From Anki's website; 

"Active recall testing means being asked a question and trying to remember the answer. This is in contrast to passive study, where we read, watch or listen to something without pausing to consider if we know the answer. Research has shown that active recall testing is far more effective at building strong memories than passive study."

• Spaced repetition;

"every time you answer a question, you tell the program how well you were able to remember it - whether you forgot completely, made a small mistake, remembered with trouble, remembered easily, etc. The program uses this feedback to decide the optimal time to show you the question again."

You can see a full review of it on ChineseMusings.com.

Memrise

www.memrise.com

This is a great website however you don't have much control over what you learn other than by selecting the course. Most courses are big and they can't be skipped through so you may find yourself learning some vocab you don't need

On Memrise you find courses - basically sets of words which you want to learn. However each time you first see a word (or get it wrong) you see a mnemonic which someone has created of that word to help you remember it. This is a great way to remember things. Memrise also has an element where you can compete with your friends - it's addictive!

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What's a Chinese radical

Chinese radicals are a very important part of Chinese characters. They mean that it is possible to tell what a Chinese character means. (kind of - see here).

What is a Chinese radical

Radicals make up Chinese characters (hanzi). They can also help with working out what the charcter means or how to pronounce the hanzi. The fire is 火 and so the character for burning hot is 炎. Intuitive!

Kangxi radicals are also used in dictionaries to sort Chinese characters. There are 214 radicals of which 7 of these are in more than 1000 characters and around a hundred are very common. You can see the full list here.

There's TED talk by Shaolan about radicals below. Shaolan went on to publish the book Chineasy.

Pronunciation and Meaning with radicals

More than 90% of Chinese characters have a radical which hints at the meaning, eg; the king radical 玉 is in the character for kingdom (or country) - 国.

But some radicals are in a character where they don't make sense. The cloud radical 云 is in the character for sport - 运. This is because the radical's pronunciation (yún) gives us a clue as to how to pronounce the whole character (yūn).

Why and how you learn them

There are a few key reasons to learn the radicals

1. Can help with remembering a character when you make a story out of the radicals (as we saw with 火 in 炎).
2. Can help with remembering pronunciation (云 in 运)
3. Needed for dictionaries and with some systems for typing in Chinese

There is a list on Wikipedia of all the radicals (also called Kangxi Radicals).
There is also a great list on hackingchinese.com of 100 important radicals

Happy learning!