hanziphobia!

[Bouks]

It's the reason I hit a wall with Japanese and got discouraged. When I look at the characters, it's like one of those ink blot tests at the psychiatrist's...

shrink: What does this look like to you?
Bouks: Ummm...my ex father-in-law holding a bucket of Oxyclean?
shrink: I think we'll increase the dose on your meds after all.

Help me out, brilliant Chinese language masters! What is the best way to learn?

I need help with stroke order, because although I know the general order to follow, it gets tricky in complicated characters (which is just about all of them for me).

And I know you'll probably say "absolutely" to this next question but I'll ask anyway: Should absolutely I be learning the hanzi at the same time I learn the words via pinyin?

Hanzi/kanji/hanja represents, for me, the "final frontier" of language learning. If I could do this, I'll imagine myself capable of doing anything...

[david]

I'd be curious to know what Frank thinks about this....

[zhouli]

hehe, absolutely. chinese charaters are tricky. but if you learn some from the very beginning, you can type something out by your computer. if you dont know how to write, it would be ok if you can pick out the right character from your computer. nowadays people seldom write letters by a pen, we use emails, right?

[maxiewawa]

Yes, they certainly do look tricky don't they! But keep at it, and you'll eventually get to the point where you don't see what all the fuss is about.

It's largely psychological if you ask me. I had the advantage of getting familiar with Hanzi in China; when you're surrounded by them, you start to get more familiar. You'll learn one simple one, then find components of that hanzi everywhere. You'll get more confident, and familiar with the whole system.

Don't think of all the thousands of characters you must learn, just take it a step at a time. Each time you learn one more character, you're 1/2000th closer to becoming literate in Chinese.

And, like the other poster mentioned, don't bother writing them with a pen. It's absolutely useless. <--personal opinion. If I had bothered learning to write every character that I know I'm sure that I'd have given up Chiense long ago!

So just take it bit by bit and don't stress about writing things with a pen.

[kimiik]

Reading chinese characters is a bit like identifying road signs, logos or visages ... many encounters with each character make it perfect.

[nickcripps]

Haha I'm addicted to Chinese characters whether they be Hanzi, Kanji or Hanja. It's the reason why I kept my interest towards learning Japanese, Chinese and Korean (even though Korean doesn't officially use Hanja anymore).

So if you're a beginner and if your goal is to simply to read and recognize characters, then I suggest you just type and type in Chinese. When you type you have to choose the correct character among dozens that sound the same so this trains you to recognize characters that share the same sound.

I just used to type anything I can get my hands on... textbook content, magazines whatever... just so I can get the chance to practice (could be boring though). When I started to learn Chinese I just used to type out random sentences such as 你好吗？ (How are you) 你叫什么名字？ (What's your name.)

Then again there's the old-fashioned method of writing characters repetitively. I love writing Chinese characters, but I don't think it's important to learn how to handwrite at all.

After a certain point you will notice the patterns in Chinese characters and soon learning new characters will be a breeze..............

[gillesvdp]

Reading chinese characters is a bit like identifying road signs, logos or visages ... many encounters with each character make it perfect.

And if you are in large cities i which English translations are displayed, you might quickly learn to recognize survival ones; like 路..

[Bouks]

Don't think of all the thousands of characters you must learn, just take it a step at a time. Each time you learn one more character, you're 1/2000th closer to becoming literate in Chinese.
[snip, snip]
So just take it bit by bit and don't stress about writing things with a pen.

Thank you Max, and everyone for your advice. So 2000 characters is the minimum for functional literacy, or an average?

I just reset my Vista settings to use Chinese, but it's tricky to figure out. But once I do, I will type, type away.

As for writing with a pen...unfortunately you're talking to a fountain pen aficionado who loves the physical act of writing as much as the content But I will save that for a calligraphy class someday. When I'm functionally literate...

[nagarjuna]

One of the best resources for this is skritter (http://www.skritter.com). It's a subscription service, but the sign-up is cheap if you are in for the long term, it works fantastically well.

[maxiewawa]

Yes, I heard that 2000 is the minimum for functional literacy, but I don't think anyone really knows... imagine listing out every single word you know in a given language, and you'll see why it's hard to put a number on it.

Good luck!

[bokane]

The thing about knowing a lot of characters is that it's not necessarily helpful if you don't know the word the characters are making up -- imagine a student of English who understands "quick," "take," and "up," but doesn't understand the phrase "quick on the uptake." The secret to good comprehension of written Chinese is -- besides knowing the characters -- good comprehension of spoken Chinese. That said, the first 1500 or so characters that you learn will cover most of any given piece of writing. I don't have the statistics in front of me, but the most common 500 or 1000 characters represent about 97% of writing.

As for how to learn them: personally I'm a big fan of writing characters by hand, since it lets you get the characters into muscle memory and more readily impresses upon you the presence of different character components. Get some graph paper -- or better still, one of the character-tracing workbooks common here for primary school students -- and just spend some time writing characters out, maybe 10 or 20 times per character. I find it's much easier for me to remember characters if I've written them, rather than having only read them.
Also, the more characters you know, the easier it gets to learn new characters. For the first hundred or so characters you learn, the learning process will just be brute-force rote memorization -- but don't give up! Soon you'll start recognizing common features between characters -- like how 想 looks an awful lot like 相 plus 心, and how that 相 looks like it's a 木 plus a 目 -- and this will let you remember characters as a collection of components (曰 plus 耳 plus 又 equals 最) rather than as a series of strokes (丨+乛+一+一+一 etc etc). This makes life ever so much easier.

[bokane]

Also, @Bouks -- if you like writing with a fountain pen, this is your lucky day! I've been working on my 钢笔 (gāngbǐ, fountain pen) writing lately myself. If you look around, you might be able to find some 字帖 (zìtiě, character tracing workbooks) for fountain pen calligraphy -- there are plenty of them here, and they're very satisfying to work with.

[Bouks]

nagarjuna: skritter looks great, I'm going to explore it more.

bokane: so glad to know another fountain pen writer - what's in your collection? I've got a MontBlanc Meisterstuck (needs repair), a Waterman Carene, a Pelikan M200 honey white, a Waterman Phileas, and a few Waterman Kulturs.

I'm not sure where to find workbooks, but I am sure I can find pages to print out.

Thanks for everyone's perspectives -- I'm starting to get a better idea of how hanzi should "feel". I will devote myself to that initial brute-force rote memorization, probably whine about it a lot, and then we'll see how it goes

Nick: I have started on flashcard creation following your advice, and I have to say, I should have applied myself seriously to this long ago for all the languages I am studying. Just typing out the characters and creating the flashcards was a very intense practice session, so when I finally loaded them on the mp3 player and review them, it seemed like I was pretty good at them already. Magical!

[holdfast]

hmm.. i'm going to add another question into the mix..

max - you wouldn't recommend writing by hand at all? i understand completely where you are coming from with that.. it is much easier to memorize the pinyin and recognize the character by typing for sure. but i just love taking notes by hand - in any language. but, i am not always sure about stroke order and all of that... the question is - do you think it will matter if i don't learn proper stroke order (i don't think i'm far off, anyway) as long as i am just writing the characters for my own notes? i'm not trying to write them perfectly, just well enough to study.. i was just curious what other people thought about how this might affect my learning in the future.

[maxiewawa]

Not really, I've never really found writing by hand useful.

It's up to you, but I write so rarely by hand in any language, that I found the emphasis some people place on writing hanzi by hand to be not useful.