I have encountered quite a lot of people asking me: How to learn Chinese? Therefore, I am going to share some thoughts here.
Reading Chinese Characters
First of all, there is something in the Chinese language system as radicals (部首). Learning and understanding these will help your children with reading. Let’s discuss some examples below.
Take this word: 木 (wood). For tree-related characters, such as 樹 (tree), sometimes you can find 木 in the character itself. Why do I say sometimes, it’s because many Chinese characters have evolved. Take another word as an example: 杯 (cup). You may wonder: aren’t cups made of ceramics, plastics, paper, etc.? This is related to the evolution of the materials used to make cups. At a stage, Chinese people used wood to make their cups. Therefore, 杯 contains 木 as it radical.
Some cases are easier. Take 衣 (clothes) as an example. When it turns to a radical, it looks like this: 衤. Many words, like 衫 (another word for clothes), 袖 (sleeves), 裙 (dress), 補 (patch), 褥 (mattress), are related to cloth. This can definitely help a lot.
Writing
For writing, there’s one such thing as “Eight Principles of Yong” (永字八法) in China. By practising writing the word 永, you can practise the eight common strokes in the Chinese characters. This is practised by the ancient Chinese calligraphers. Learning these basic strokes can definitely help with writing.
Speaking
For speaking, it is a hard job. Even as a native speaker, I sometimes have words spoken wrong. A not-so-accurate tip is this: a Chinese character can be separated into several different components (an example is the radicals).
If you see a word with a left-right structure (the most common one like the examples above), the left one will mostly be the radical. You read out the right part of the word. (Sometimes you will get very close — just the tone is wrong.) There are way more structures involving other radicals and components, but that will be another long explanation.
Final Tips
But the best advice you will get from everyone is to copy the words you don’t know to a notebook and revise it regularly. This will help you to learn almost every language faster.
Last words: Practise more. Practising will definitely help. But to conclude here, don’t rely too much on the radicals for reading; write and speak more.
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