<p>Anyone taking Chinese as their foreign language? If so, any advice on memorizing the characters? It takes me half an hour to memorize just one, I feel as if I'm doing something wrong. -_-</p>
<p>You aren’t going to memorize the characters just by looking at it. I’m assuming it’s like any other language. Make some flashcards and try to match the characters to the pinyin and the translation.</p>
<p>lol yes, I do that, but that only gets me to recognize them, which isn’t so useful when it comes to the written portions of tests. I usually rewrite them over and over until it sticks, which is pretty time consuming. The pinyin and the translation are pretty easy, it’s just the characters that I have trouble with.</p>
<p>Do you have a Chinese teacher? I find it very helpful because she’s always writing stuff in characters and really trying to get us to recognize them. Also, I like to challenge myself and try to write things in Chinese throughout the day.</p>
<p>You just have to write the characters over and over again until you can remember them. **** sucks.</p>
<p>But after 2 to 3 years, your new words you have to learn will be old characters put in new combinations, or characters that are similar to old ones (and sort of sound like them too; like sha (sand) and shao (less)). It’ll get easier then.</p>
<p>I take Chinese, and I LOVE it! But about the characters, what I do is to try to make a correlation between what it means and what it looks like, so I have something to remember it by. My teacher would tell us the etylmology of each character, if you could call it that, and that really helped.</p>