When learning a language with characters, your brain needs time to adapt. This activity focuses on learning characters and building techniques to remember and read them. After a few hundred, your brain adjusts and active character study becomes less necessary, though you'll still keep learning new words as part of vocabulary study.
Parent Skills:
When learning a language with characters, your brain needs time to adapt. This activity focuses on learning characters and building techniques to remember and read them. After a few hundred, your brain adjusts and active character study becomes less necessary, though you'll still keep learning new words as part of vocabulary study.
Learn to read by looking at little pictures
Unlock the world of written texts in several related languages
Important if you want to be considered literate
The best tutorial for how to do this is to read our Character Primer: https://refold.link/character-primer
It goes into better depth on how to learn characters effectively.
Once you've learned to read the phonetic writing system well (such as Kana or Pinyin), you should turn your attention to characters. If you're not able to fluidly read that writing system yet, keep working on it. It's more important right now and much quicker.
It's going to take hundreds of hours and thousands of characters before your brain truly gets used to them, but that's why it's important to start now. You shouldn't be doing that much explicit character study, only enough to become familiar with how they work and how to learn them. Once you're there, reading a lot and doing vocab study will be how you learn new characters.
There's more depth in our character primer, but the most common issue people face with character learning is trying to memorize the character rather than the word itself.
A character is only a part of a whole word. Words are made up of: meaning, pronunciation, character, semantic nuance, etc. Lots of things! Beginner learners will try to specifically memorize the relationship between a character and the meaning. Or the character and the pronunciation rather than learning the character as part of the whole word.
Words come before characters. This is one of the reasons we recommend starting with phonetic writing systems first. That way, you can already learn a few hundred words, then start to connect characters to those words. It's a lot easier this way (and more like how native speakers do it as children).