Learn to write in Chinese
Learn to write in Chinese
Is it necessary to make a pedagogical evaluation of our knowledge in Mandarin Chinese before resorting to a private teacher?
Intimidation … It is a word that could describe the excitement felt by foreign students in their introductory Chinese courses. With more than 5,000 official characters, not counting the obsolete and special sinograms from before the reform, learning to write in Chinese has a lot of merit.
Are you looking for a Chinese course ?: Learn to write in Chinese
For those who are not discouraged, they will have to get personally involved and work at home to improve:
The memorization of the hanzi,
Your pronunciation,
Its meaning.
To learn to write in Chinese , you have to quickly assimilate the basic rules and apply them to every stroke, every character, and every text.
To begin with, you have to concentrate on assimilating the first characters before launching into learning new ones. This technique allows you to consolidate knowledge so as not to mix it up.
Next, it is of crucial importance to multiply the association of a character form with its meaning. In this way, we create a mnemonic reflection that allows us not to forget the character.
Finally, you have to quickly fix the pronunciation. Each character has to be associated with an intonation according to the context in which it is found in a phrase or text.
To learn to write in Chinese , all language schools, the Confucius Institute and cultural associations agree that respecting the established rules and repeating the process is a guarantee of quality.
In addition, kinesthetic tends to democratize in schools during the learning of Mandarin Chinese, since the union created between the movement of each writing and memory brings its fruits.
Thus, by following the lists of characters classified by difficulty, and treating each Chinese character as an independent entity, we can achieve impressive results in a short period of learning.
Writing Chinese: Techniques for Learning Chinese Characters
Mandarin Chinese word formation is done with a maximum of 64 signs.
Chinese characters represent the cornerstone of this ancient language, standardized in 1956 by the People’s Republic of China.
To assimilate the writing of Chinese characters, it is necessary to assimilate general rules that, through frequent and regular practice, will allow their memorization and reproduction.
To begin with, we will evoke the fact that each stroke is made up of several strokes, between 1 and more than 20 . To understand the breadth of these strokes in Mandarin Chinese, we will take into account the fact that it is not possible to search for a character in a Chinese dictionary without first knowing the number of strokes that make it up.
The writing of Chinese characters is inscribed in an invisible square of which we will respect the limits, and they correspond to 8 fundamental lines that define the meaning traced for each hanzi. Either by means of a straight, curved or truncated movement, the orientation of the line constitutes the base on which we must support ourselves.
The characters follow one another and follow a certain direction defined millennia ago based on the care of their appearance and their balance.
The Hanzi writing learning method rests on 3 fundamentals classified according to a precise hierarchy:
The first is to be interested in the graphic aspect of Chinese characters. With particular attention to what we call “radicals”.
These key elements of the formation of a sign will allow to memorize, locate and reproduce the Chinese character as a whole.
From these keys -which we count around 200- it will be easy for the student to form other Chinese characters associating them with the pictograms that mean the same thing.
Learn Chinese thanks to calligraphy
Rare are Chinese dictionaries that can contain up to 56,000 characters.
Also called 书法, calligraphy is one of the oldest arts in human history , attracting fans of Chinese culture and traditional art alike.
It is also another way to learn Chinese writing without being locked into a spiral of repetitive and not very interactive master classes.
Without going into the details related to the spiritual aspect, of communion between body and mind, or philosophy of life, that make up calligraphy, this tool can be an excellent way to train in Chinese writing.
Indeed, by insisting on the mastery of the gesture, the quality of the stroke and the technical aspect, the learning of calligraphy is done in such a way that each Chinese character can be quickly integrated in order to perfect our style.
It is true that this hard core of Chinese culture has relied on more characters since ancient times than are necessary for a new speaker of Chinese, but it is constructed by rules that correspond to those of the Hanzi script.
Thus, we will use calligraphy respecting the order of the strokes, their meaning, just as we would do in writing a Chinese character with a pen and a sheet of paper.
We will leave the case at home to learn Chinese writing through calligraphy , and why not add Chinese classes in addition to speaking, writing and understanding the Confucian language.
Chinese writing is often said to be calligraphic, except when it comes to the art of calligraphy.