A month or two ago I read a post by James about how he had gotten rid of most of the individual characters from his study, and I decided to try it for myself.

It's helped a ton - it's really allowed me to streamline my study and make my time much more efficient, while making Skritter time much more enjoyable as I'm not daily bombarded with those obnoxious characters with 15 definitions, none of which are useful without tacking on at least one more character anyway.

So thanks to James for the great advice, and for those of you considering this step, I'd highly recommend it.

Note that I still keep certain individual characters if they're useful on their own, but anything that I'm not used to seeing alone gets the boot, and it's been a huge relief.

Yes, I finally got around to doing this myself too (it didn't take as long as I expected to delete all the entries in "my words")

Learning the meanings of individual characters was VERY helpful to me in the beginning. However, I began to tire of having to write simple individual characters when I had forgotten which character was used as part of a word.

I think there might be an inflection point for the benefits of individual characters as learning moves from character writing -> word building. But with the current page that shows definitions of both word & character, I no longer see the benefit of studying single characters if they are not commonly used alone.

Agree completely. I only add individual characters if I know a few words with them in.

Yeah, I now mark individual characters "too easy" whenever they come up; I like to review their potential meanings, but you certainly can waste a lot of time at it if you're not careful.

Great to hear it! I feel pretty good about it myself. When I was actively studying a couple of weeks ago I was making a lot of rapid progress.

@ZachH I completely agree; I would still highly recommend that a beginner start with radicals and other common components if only to get the different components into muscle memory and build up associations to start making mnemonics.

By the way, FatDragon, I went further than you, I didn't leave in any single characters except those that didn't appear in any two-character words, even if they had a legitimate meaning as single characters. But since I'm far from a Chinese expert, I have a question and/or challenge: can you think of any single characters which are

a) not radicals
b) used in modern Chinese for meanings other than just names/surnames (i.e. 刘, which as far as I know is just used as a surname, wouldn't count)
c) not contained in any two-character words according to Skritter's database?

?

James

Well, you can make words with absolutely anything. But sometimes the individual character is more important than any of the minor dictionary combinations. Then it's worth studying individually, I feel. 掂, 搁, and maybe 砸, 绊, 掀. From these only 掂 truly satisfies your criteria though.

Also, 刘 is used in 斜刘海.

Edit: Oh, also things like 啥 or 嗲 too. Particles also if you want to count them.

@Byzanti wow, that's an awesome find with 斜刘海, thanks!

Skritter has three two-character compounds for 掂: 掂量, 掂算, and 掂掇. A quick check of Yellowbridge also turned up multiple two-character words for each of the others.

James

Even 嗲?

Anyway, those I checked also had them as part of longer things too. But these words are basically used alone anyway (or the 'maybe 3' with directions after), so I find it a bit silly to learn them in compounds. 歪 is another. Sure, according to MDBG you can say 歪曲, but in most situations, 歪 is just going to be on it's own. 崴 is another. You can use it to mean sprain sth. It's also in the compound for Vladivostock, but adding that would be silly.

Right, 嗲 seems like a legitimate one. Particles too.

I don't see why learning characters in words or phrases would prevent you from learning their standalone meaning. For example, I learned 紊 in context and never studied it alone, but I can remember that it means "tangled".

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with studying characters in isolation, just that I found it kind of inefficient. And my real goal is to know lots of words and phrases rather than lots of characters.

James

I generally agree with you, that words are better to learn than characters. But these are common words in their own right. Like 用 is. I make an exception!

Edit: 删掉了一些 。太郁闷, 不喜欢争论...!

Yeah I think there was a previous thread about this... is there a list somewhere on the Internet of commonly-used single-character words? That would be very helpful. If not I will see if I can derive it from http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing ; I think a rough approximation would be the frequency of a certain character minus the frequency of all common bigrams that contain that character.

James

和 [hú] – the verb for winning mahjong
商 – quotient (there is the word 商数 but not in Skritter and the character is used more often)
幂 – power (2的3次幂得8 2 to the power of 3 is 8)
熵 – entropy

Actually, I’m neutral in this argument. I found myself alternating between learning characters and words. For months, I’ll only add multi-character words. Then, I’ll only study characters for a long period of time. Currently, I concentrate in characters and spend a lot of time thinking about their meanings. That is because I’ve some problems in distinguishing some characters. For example, 缅/湎, 鹜/骛, 溜/蹓/遛, 谋/牟, 质/置, 善/擅, 退/蜕. Thinking about the meaning of the characters help me to distinguish between 谋求/牟求, 质疑/置疑, 擅长/善长, 退化/蜕化 etc…

So, I think there are different stages in one’s learning process and people will do different things at different stages.

pts, how do you use Skritter to learn to discriminate "look-alike" characters?

After reading this I looked to see if Skritter had a list of frequently confused characters, but could not find one. I would think this might be one of those cases where you would want to keep groupings of characters together in the sequence that Skritter serves them up, which I don't think can be done currently in Skritter.

When I’ve problem with a certain word, I’ll write it down in a note book. Skritter helps me to discover the problems, but merely going over them again and again in Skritter doesn’t help. I know how to write them, read them and roughly what they mean. But it’s in the finer points. So I’ve to look them up in dictionaries and the Internet, find out the etymology of the characters and think about their meanings when used in different contexts.

Hey PTS,

although I do not have your level, you can try to add the confused characters to the definition. So when prompted you always see the other character and know to write the right one. With the repetitions you notice the differences over time easily.

I add -NC 汉字 character, to the original definition.

I talked to Nick about that some while back for a link field to frequently mixed up characters or meanings but due to the fact that the interface should stay simple and that he was not sure where to get the mixups from, I do not expect anything to happen soon.

You might want to check http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm Number 11 too. The article is quite interesting anyway.

Regards,
Alex

@MasterOfComboBoxes interference is a huge problem for me too. I tend to deal with it by adding further context, but in some cases even that doesn't work for me. One problem is figuring out when to use 但是 vs. 可是; someone explained to me once that the only real difference is where they can appear in the sentence.

Hey James,

I am afraid I cannot help with such subtleties (yet). But I think this is more of an issue of understanding rather than learning by heart, unless you have an extended context list when to use those two "but"s. If you don't know the rule, the SRS won't work.

MasterOfComboBoxes, thank you for the article. My experience is similar to what is mentioned there. I think I know a word, but suddenly, I become confused. But I try to solve the problem in a different way. My aim is more than answering the Skritter prompts correctly. Answering the Skritter prompts do not matter. What is important is being able to use the words correctly in the real world. There are endless ways how a question will be asked in the real world. So I see adding cues to the prompts or rephrasing the prompts as merely cheating. I tackle the problem by trying to find out the nuances between the words instead.

For example, the candidate answers to the following sentences are 年轻/年青
1: 五十岁以下的_ _ 干部都可以争取这次竞选的机会。
2: 你_ _ 时不努力学习，将来要后悔的。
3: 小李今年23岁，很_ _ 。

In order to answer these questions, I ponder upon the meaning of the characters轻 and 青. 青 is the color green. Green is the color of a light ray with a certain wave length. It has an absolute value. 轻 is about weight. So is 1 pound considered heavy or light? It all depends. It is relative and has no absolute value. Seeing this difference, I now know that 年轻 is something relative to the age of the speaker and 年青 refers a specific age range. The answer to 1 and 3 is 年轻 and that to 2 is年青. And this is how I deal with this kind of problems recently, by gaining a deeper knowledge of the characters.

@pts that's great, where do you find examples like that?

In phonetics they have a concept of "minimal pairs" that distinguish phonemes. In English, for example, pin and pen are a minimal pair for e/i (technically their sounds, but you know what I mean). These are very useful for language learners. Sentences like that are like minimal pairs for the different meanings...

James

Those examples are collected some time ago and so I can’t remember exactly where they are from. Probably from some supplementary exercises for the secondary school students I borrowed from the library, or some online mock exams, past exam papers …

Can you please explain how you got rid of individual characters? Did you delete them from my words? Did you rate them as too easy?

I'd like to give it a try. Thanks!

What I did was just slowly add words until they subsumed the characters...

@atdlouis I do it the hard way. Whenever I see a single character I click on the magnifying glass to get the detail page. I check the compound words to make sure that there's at least one that contains the character added to my words; if there is, I click on the "delete" buttons on the bottom for each of the parts. Then I repeat the whole process for the traditional variant (if the first character was simplified).

As discussed above, some characters are not contained in any words, while others are useful by themselves, so be judicious in which characters you delete and which ones you retain.

I considered doing it by deleting some lists from study and removing all their characters, but I thought that would be a little too aggressive.

James

I deleted everything and started from scratch. Firstly I removed lists and then manually removed everything from "my words".

Now I'm re-building.

You don't have to remove the individual characters from Skritter, although that is one way. Alternatively, if you've a word for each character, when you get something wrong, you can mark the word wrong but the characters right. This way you never see the characters individually.

However, if you do feel you want to see a character individually (maybe it's a really long piece of vocab or something), then you can always keep the character marked wrong and it'll show up itself (at least some of the time, I'm not sure on how this works completely - maybe you have to mark the character wrong and the word right).

James,

I have a question for you. When I first started using Skritter, I thought I read in the form one of your posts where you recommended adjusting your study settings so that "Also add characters when adding words" is turned on.

But deleting individual characters from your study seems to be against that advice. Am I confusing something?

Alex

@atdlouis That's quite possible, although I don't really remember. I don't do that any more. ;)

James