How Not to Forget the Meaning
and Writing of Chinese Characters
Book 1
James W. Heisig; Timothy W. Richardson
University of Hawai‘i Press honolulu
Introduction
The aim of this course is to help you teach yourself, as quickly
and efficiently as possible, the meaning and writing of the 3,000 most commonly
used Chinese characters. The course is intended not only for beginners,
but also for more advanced students looking for some way to systematize what
they already know and gain relief from the constant frustration of forgetting
how to write the characters. By showing how to break down the complexities of
the characters into their basic elements, assigning meanings to those elements,
and arranging the characters in a unique and rational order, the method aims
to make use of the structural properties of the writing system itself to reduce
the burden on memory.
The 55 lessons that make up Book 1 cover the 1,000 most commonly used
characters in the Chinese writing system, plus another 500 included either
because they are needed to preserve the logical ordering of the material or
because they are especially easy to learn at this early stage. Book 2 will add
another 1,500 characters for a total of 3,000—all of them selected on the basis
of the frequency with which they appear in written Chinese. What you will
not learn here is how to pronounce any of these characters or how to combine
them to form new words. Since this breaks with conventional methods for
teaching characters, it is important that you understand the rationale behind
the approach before setting out.
To students approaching Chinese from a mother tongue written with an
alphabet, the characters represent a forbidding obstacle, one that involves the
memorization of thousands of complex configurations, each of which has to be
tethered to a particular sound and a particular meaning or function. Focusing
for the moment just on what is involved in trying to commit the written forms
to memory, imagine yourself holding a kaleidoscope up to the light as still as
possible, trying to fix in memory the particular pattern that the play of light
and mirrors and colored stones has created. Chances are, your mind is unaccustomed
to processing such material and it will take some time to organize
the pattern for retention and recall. But let us suppose that you succeed after
ten or fifteen minutes. You close your eyes, trace the pattern in your head, and
then check your image against the original pattern, repeating the process until
you are sure you have it committed to memory.
Then someone passes by and jars your elbow. The pattern is lost forever and
in its place a new jumble appears. Immediately your memory begins to scramble.
You set the kaleidoscope aside, sit down, and try to draw what you had just
memorized, but to no avail. There is simply nothing left in memory to grab
hold of. The characters are like that. One can sit at one’s desk and drill a number
of characters for an hour or two, only to discover on the morrow that when
something similar is seen, the former memory is erased or hopelessly confused
by the new information. No wonder learners begin to think that they simply
don’t have a good memory for characters, or decide that learning to write characters
is not so important anyway.
In many cases failure to retain what has been learned has much less to do
with a lack of ability than with the lack of a method of learning adjusted to the
circumstances of the learner. Of course we forget, and some of us forget more
than others. But some of this forgetting is due to a simple misuse, even abuse,
of our powers of memory, and is therefore preventable. The first step to prevention
is to break with certain preconceptions about learning to write Chinese.
Uprooting biases about character learning
One bias circulating among teachers and students of the Chinese
language is that a character’s meaning, pronunciation, and writing need to be
learned at the same time. Chinese textbooks typically include all three bits of
information for each character or compound term as it is introduced, in addition
to supplying details about grammatical function and examples of usage.
Of course, these things are important, but to have to learn them all at once
places an unreasonable burden on memory. Little wonder that the brain slows
down or grinds to a complete halt.
The Chinese themselves are not faced with this problem. As children, they
are exposed first to the spoken language, learning how to associate sounds with
meanings. When the time comes to learn how to read, they already have at
their disposal a solid basis of words whose sounds and meanings are familiar
to them; all that remains is to associate those words with written forms. Doing
so opens them to printed texts, which, in turn, helps them assimilate new words
and characters. Those of us who come to the language as adults can gain a similar
advantage by tying each of the character forms to a particular unit of pronunciation
and meaning, a “key word” in English, that we already know.
Before you dismiss the idea of affixing English words to Chinese characters
out of hand, consider this: all the Chinese dialects, no matter how mutually
unintelligible they are when spoken, use the same characters for writing. These
characters convey the same meaning, no matter how they are pronounced. What
is more, when the Japanese use Chinese characters, they assign them still other
pronunciations. In other words, there is nothing in the nature of a character
dictating that it must be verbalized one way or another. Unlike students coming
to Chinese from an alphabetically written language, the Japanese already know
the meaning and writing of a great many of the characters. By the time you
finish this course, you will be in a position similar to theirs. Of course, you will
eventually need to learn Chinese pronunciations, just as Japanese students do.
But adding difficult and unfamiliar sounds to a solid knowledge of character
forms is a much more manageable task than trying to memorize meaning, pronunciation,
and writing all at the same time.
If some separation of learning tasks seems reasonable, then why not acquire
a sizable vocabulary of Chinese pronunciations and meanings first—as the
Chinese children do—and then pick up writing later? After all, oral language is
the older, more universal, and more ordinary means of communication. Hence
the bias that if anything is to be postponed, it should be the introduction of the
writing system. The truth is, written characters bring a high degree of clarity to
the multiplicity of meanings carried by homophones in the spoken language.
For example, even an ordinary pocket dictionary of Mandarin lists some 60
characters that are pronounced yi in one or another of its tonal variants, with
at least 30 distinct characters in the fourth tone alone. Each of these characters
carries its own meaning or meanings, which the simple syllable yi of itself
cannot communicate. Beginning with characters and their meanings greatly
reduces this ambiguity.
The idea that writing should come after speaking is bolstered by another,
more pervasive bias: the writing of characters is the most complex part of the
language to learn. In fact, it is a far simpler task than is often supposed, as these
books hope to demonstrate. In addition, beginning with the writing leaves the
student with solid units of form and meaning to which Chinese pronunciations
can then be attached. Even more important, completing what is usually
perceived to be the most challenging task first, and in a relatively short period
of time, rather than leaving it for later, cannot help but motivate one to carry on
with the language. Given high attrition rates among students of Chinese in the
West, the role of such positive reinforcement is not to be discounted.
Yet another bias that needs uprooting is the idea that characters can only
be mastered through constant drill and repetition. Traditional methods for
approaching the Chinese writing system have been the same as those for learning
alphabets: practice writing the characters one by one, over and over again,
for as long as it takes. Whatever ascetic value there is in such an exercise, it is
hardly the most efficient way to approach character study. The reason this bias
has such a strong hold on students of Chinese is that persons completely ignorant
of the Chinese writing system naturally rely on teachers who have learned
characters from childhood. Surely a pedagogy with many centuries of history
behind it and over a billion users demands our respect. Here again, the prevailing
wisdom is deceptive.
Native speakers of Chinese are clearly in a position to teach a good many
things about their language, but they are not necessarily qualified to answer
questions from non-native speakers about how best to learn the characters, for
the simple reason that they themselves have never been in the situation of having
to ask such a question. Having begun their study as children, in whom the
powers of abstraction were not yet developed and for whom rote memory was
the only option, they cannot be expected to fully grasp the learning potential an
adult brings to the study of the characters. As children, we were all good imitators,
with few habits to get in the way of our absorption of new skills. But we
did not become good learners until we had the ability to classify, categorize, and
organize discreet bits of information into larger blocks. This is precisely what
young children cannot do with character forms and why they have no choice
but to rely on imitation and repetition. Whatever educational and social advantages
there may be to having an entire school population study Chinese characters
by writing them again and again from an early age, for the adult approaching
the language from the outside it amounts to little more than a gigantic waste
of time. A touch of irreverence towards current pedagogical conventions, along
with a little rethinking of the way the characters are studied and the order in
which they are learned, can produce far better results than simple reliance on
methods designed for the teaching of children.
The approach followed in these pages incorporates important elements of
all three broad areas into which cognitive learning strategies are thought to
fall—organization, elaboration, and rehearsal—and entails a strong reliance on
memory techniques or “mnemonics.” The very word is sure to tap into predispositions
against the use of mnemonics in general, and for the learning of Chinese
characters in particular. Here, too, the biases run deep, and we can do little
more in these introductory remarks than try to identify them and offer a brief
response.1
For some, reservations about mnemonics are grounded in the image of disreputable
charlatans who hype expensive memory-training courses as the key
to a better job and a better life. It is true that exaggerated claims have been
made, but empirical studies over the last several decades have clearly demonstrated
that well-conceived mnemonic devices can be very useful for certain
memory tasks. This has lead many scholars to recommend them as legitimate
learning strategies.
These scholarly developments also help address another concern: mnemonics
are simply too bizarre or too silly to use. Actually, they can be quite sophisticated
and elegant. Surely the more important question is whether they work or
not. The whole range of possibilities, from the silly to the sophisticated, leaves
ample room for personal taste or preference in determining what best facilitates
learning.
Still another apprehension some may have is that mnemonic devices clutter
the mind and separate the learner from the matter to be learned. On the contrary,
insofar as such devices provide meaning and organization that would not otherwise
exist, they actually unclutter the mind. Besides, once recall for a particular
item has become automatic, the mnemonic initially used to fix that item in
memory usually falls away of its own accord.
The dominant bias against the use of mnemonics for learning Chinese
characters is that it is inappropriate to overstep the boundaries of current etymological
knowledge, even more so when these liberties are taken without drawing
attention to the fact. To do so is not to communicate the “truth” about the
characters. This complaint speaks directly to what you will meet in these pages.
On one hand, much of the course is grounded in scholarly consensus on the
history of the characters. On the other, we have not hesitated to ignore established
etymologies whenever doing so seemed pedagogically useful. In fact, the
course relies heavily on fictions of our own invention. At least two reasons support
this choice. For one thing, even the most comprehensive account of how
particular characters were formed may be far from the whole “truth” concerning
them. Much remains speculative or unknown. For another, however reliable
the etymological information may be, for most learners of Chinese it is not
as crucial as finding relief for memory—which is what we have tried to provide
here. Should a student later turn to etymological studies, the procedure we have
followed will become more transparent, and the fact that we did not indicate
each departure from an established etymology should not cause any obstacle to
learning. With this, we lay the question of mnemonics to rest.
Two final and related biases require brief comment: (1) the learning of individual
characters in isolation from compound words and grammatical patterns
is mistaken; and (2) a single key word is often inadequate to cover a character’s meaning.
We acknowledge that effective reading requires a knowledge of compound
words and grammatical patterns; however, we concur with those who stress the
value of learning individual characters well in order to solidify “the network of
possible morphemes upon which all dual and multi-character words are built.”2
Similarly, we are aware that one-word definitions are of limited use; however,
we agree with those who see them as a solid starting point for developing a
richer and more nuanced understanding. The study of individual characters,
each with a distinct meaning, is only a first step towards literacy in Chinese.
For the rest, only a broad and prolonged contact with the written language will suffice.
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