The Smartest Way to Learn to Read & Write Chinese
*This blog is reader-supported. I may earn a commission for purchases made through links in this post. Read full Affiliate Disclaimer here.
Table of Contents
Why Learn Chinese Characters?
Remembering the Traditional Hanzi
Skritter - The App The Teaches You to Write Chinese Characters
Reading Transcripts of Podcasts
Reading books - The Benefits of Learning Written Mandarin
What I would Do Different
Learning to read and write Chinese characters is probably the most challenging part of learning Chinese.
Not only are you learning a whole new script, with 1000s of characters, but you’re also learning the meaning of each of them them and how they are pronounced.
It takes Chinese children a long time to learn to read and write Chinese characters. 12 years of school to be able to read and write to the point where they can read and write the most common characters.
It’s a long time.
And who of us have that kind of time? And if we did, why would we wanna wait that long?
There is good news though because there’s a faster and better way to learn it than sheer drilling and repetition. A way where you get to use your creative thinking to really hack learning this stunningly beautiful script.
In this post you’ll read about the methods that I’ve used to learn to read and write Chinese characters successfully, parts of my own personal journey, as well as some things I would do differently if I would have start over.
Why Learn Chinese Characters?
First off - why is it important to learn Chinese characters?
When I first started learning Cantonese I told myself I wouldn’t learn to read and write but only learn to speak the language. It just seemed it would take so much time and I was mainly just wanting to be able to speak with people.
But even after a few months I started being curious and I thought I could just casually learn them on the side for fun.
It started off as more of thing I did out of interest.
And later on when I was starting to really progress in my Finnish through reading I discovered how important it is to be able to read in a language.
It’s such an effective way to expand your vocabulary and also if you want to reach more advanced levels it’s pretty tough to do that without reading.
Because you’ll be quite limited when you can’t read the language - being unable to read menus to order food from, signs, or browse webpages written in Chinese.
But even more than that there’s a lot more material that you’ll be able access through reading.
And with Cantonese it’s really helpful to be able read because most Cantonese YouTubers use Chinese subtitles. So it helps you to be able to pick out the words when you aren’t able to hear them.
Remembering the Traditional Hanzi
I had heard about the book Remembering the Traditional Hanzi by James W. Heisig and that it was a method using mnemonics in order to memorize the characters way faster than even the Chinese themselves would do in school.
So with that as a premise I was of course very curious.
Heisig’s method cuts down the time it takes by many times based on a very smart system of how to learn the 3000 most common characters (split into 2 books with 1500 characters each).
The books are available in Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese as well as Kanji (Japanese). I naturally chose Traditional since that’s what is being used in Hong Kong.
I absolutely loved the book and thought his approach was genius! I don’t consider myself the most creative thinker by any stretch, but I seriously had fun making these memorable stories and “memory pictures” in my head that he lays out how to do in the book.
It was fast to memorize the characters by splitting them up in smaller components and seeing them as a “hat”, “nail”, “sun” and so on and then making up stories involving those.
You get a lot of help in the beginning to make these stories and then as you get more into it you’re able to create them with only some keywords that is provided.
The characters are not taught in the order of the most common ones, but in the sequence of how it’s the easiest to learn them in a logical way building upon each other.
The downside is you might not be able to use the characters as fast, but in the long run it’s really worth it as it’s a very fast way to learn them.
I had so much fun going through the book and writing the characters out by hand. Just that feeling of: “oh my gosh I’m writing Chinese!” was very motivating.
It’s also a very thoughtful and well-written book.
My highly used Remembering the Traditional Hanzi 1 & Remembering the Traditional Hanzi 2 books.
They ended up coming with me around the world to quite a few different countries.
Skritter - The App The Teaches You to Write Chinese Characters
For the first few months I wrote out the characters by hand that I was learning in Remebering the Traditional Hanzi.
This was until I discovered the app “Skritter”.
Skritter is an app where you can learn to write Chinese (and Japanese) characters by hand with your fingers. And the great thing about it is that it also teaches you the right stroke order.
On top of that it also uses SRS (spaced repetition system) so the app have you repeat the characters in intervals that make sense for learning efficiency.
It was also super handy that they also had lists of many Chinese character books and Remembering the Traditional Hanzi was one of them.
So whenever I went through a chapter in the book, I could then just download all those characters in that particular chapter I was on into Skritter.
So once I had created the mnemonics I could actually try and see if I remembered them and also get used to writing them in the right stroke order.
Try Skritter by clicking on the button below. You’ll get a 10% discount through Lingtuitive.
It also includes a free 7-day trial that you can cancel any time.
I never use Skritter on the computer as I find a bit too clunky. But on the phone drawing with your fingers it works like a charm!
One good thing to know is that every character you’ve imported you’ll be able to review forever without having to have a paid subscription.
So what you can do is just get the subscription while you’re going through the book and importing the characters. And then once you’re done you can stop using a paid subscription and just review what you know until you decide you want to add more characters.
However, I would not recommend to import all the characters at once from the book. Yeah you might save a few bucks, but it will be pretty overwhelming since you’ll be asked to review characters you haven’t yet learned in the book.
And the ones you really want to review will just be lost in the sea of characters.
All in all I love this app and it’s very pleasurable to use so I warmly recommend it. Plus, the team over at Skritter are really awesome people.
TIP: If you’d like you can type in the pronunciation of the characters in Skritter after you’ve imported them (as you can see I’ve done in the picture below). The app has the Mandarin pronunciation (and I believe Japanese too) but not the Cantonese one.
Skritter makes it so convenient to learn to write the characters on your smart phone.
Reading Transcripts of Podcasts
Transcripts from some kind of spoken material is a great thing to read. Especially when you’re starting out it’s a lot easier to read those types of materials.
The reason being is that when we speak we only use like 10% of the language.
When we read books we have a much richer and colorful language and a wider range of vocabulary.
This is also the reason books are such a great language learning resource because you just get such quality language from them.
I mentioned this in my post: How I learned Cantonese From Scratch - Part 2 but you can become a Patreon follower of the Rhapsody in Lingo podcast and get access to full transcripts of the episodes (the first 10 mins are available for free on the website).
It’s well worth the few dollars per episode to support them and it’s a very interesting podcast about language learning. Very useful vocabulary to learn for those who are interested in languages.
I import all of them into LingQ and both read and listen to them there.
Want to get my FREE Guide where I share my best secrets to learning any language successfully?
Reading Books - The Benefits of Learning Written Mandarin
I started using LingQ (use this link to get 37% off LingQ. It’s free to sign up and try it out first.) in my Cantonese about 1.5 years into learning Cantonese and use I that app still to this day every single day. I use it to read everything -books, subtitles from YouTube videos, podcast transcripts, new articles & short stories.
I wouldn’t be able to read Chinese if it wasn’t for this app/webpage that’s for sure. And I honestly couldn’t imagine learning to read Chinese without using it.
The ability to click on each word and instantly get the definitions as well as being able to add your own definitions and notes is just so helpful.
In the beginning I started out reading the mini stories they have available at LingQ as well as a few other things. I also imported some Bible chapters from my Cantonese Bible with the help of the app Pleco.
Another thing I imported was all the Cantonese Conversations Chinese transcripts so that I could not only use them for listening practice - but also for reading practice. Taking material that was already familiar to me made the reading easier.
The first book I read was “The Little Prince” which is available in Cantonese.
And then when I was around 2 years into learning Cantonese I started reading regular books using LingQ.
There are quite few books available in Cantonese as it’s mostly a spoken language and not a written one (although you can find some).
And even though you can find some books in written Cantonese, for me it’s more important to read interesting content than it is to read content at just the right level.
For me personally, I’d rather read something that’s a bit too hard and get used to it rather than something that’s just at the right level but doesn’t align with my interests.
And my philosophy has always been - if something is hard, then it’s probably only gonna get easier from here on out.
So what I’ve done is buying books written in Mandarin that have the traditional characters.
This is obviously gonna be more challenging and there are definitely differences between the Cantonese and Mandarin in written form. But the majority is the same between the two.
Probably a good 70-80% is the same and the ones that are different are mostly the most high frequency words. Mandarin for example uses 是 (si6) for the word “to be” while Cantonese uses 係 (hai6).
And with time you just get used to it.
The first book I read was the Taiwan version of “Strengthen Yourself in the Lord” by Bill Johnson.
For sure was very slow in the beginning to read, but as with anything, after doing it consistently you get used to it. I would read for at least 30 mins every morning while eating breakfast and just let the time do the work for me.
Having the attitude of not being in a rush is key when learning Chinese characters. And it makes it a lot more enjoyable too.
Other books I have read are Brené Brown’s book “Dare to Lead” and “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill.
For me it’s the most motivating to read books that I’m just interested in reading in English and just swapping English for Cantonese (I do this with Finnish too).
So I’m always reading something that I’m interested in. It’s never just a language learning activity. That way the motivation is twofold - to improve my reading skills and also to actually consume and learn from what I’m reading in my target language.
I might pick up on more books written originally in Chinese in the future though.
Learning to read Mandarin turned out to be a very good decision for 3 reasons:
1.) It lets me understand YouTube subtitles and comments that are written in Mandarin.
2.) It really has set me up for whenever I’d like to learn mandarin. I’m already very familiar with it in written form - I just need to learn how the characters are pronounced since I currently pronounce it with the Cantonese pronunciation.
3.) I have access to tons more interesting content since there is so much material out there in traditional characters in Mandarin (or Standard Chinese). All the books written in, or translated for, Taiwan for example.
A lot of Cantonese youtube channels, TV shows, movies etc. uses hard-coded mandarin. So being able to read those is invaluable and makes learning Cantonese that much easier.
If you want to know more why reading is so effective then I wrote a blog post about it: 5 reasons Reading is the Fastest Way to Learn a Language
Reading my Cantonese Bible that I had just bought on my Honeymoon in Hong Kong
What I would Do Different
If I would do one thing different it would be to possibly just do the 1st Remembering the Hanzi book and then move on from there to reading.
I mean things are hard to say in hindsight right, but I just found the most benefit was in the first book.
By the time I got to the second one I was already familiar enough with the stroke order - which is very useful when you need to look up a word in a dictionary like Pleco (which is what I use) because it will recognize the character based on the right stroke order.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s definitely value in the 2nd book and knowing myself and my desire to want to “finish things” I probably would still have done it.
But the real mistake I did was that I went through the 2nd book a liiitle too fast.
I was just excited to start reading and wanted to finish it first so I ended up not spending enough time on the mnemonics. Especially at the end it was more of a speed-run.
Because of this some of them I just don’t remember anymore. And I would have saved a lot more time in the long run to take my time with them.
So if I would advise you what to do I would for sure get the 1st book and then either:
- Move on to reading
OR
- Take your time with the Remembering the Hanzi 2 and learn the characters properly, not speeding through the mnemonics like I did.
And it depends a bit on your goals.
If you’re interested in journaling or writing in general then I’d do the 2nd book for sure. I personally hardly ever write out Chinese by hand with a pen and paper. I pretty much only want to be able to recognize them for reading & to be able to look them up in a dictionary.
Although, if I do decide to write more by hand in the future then it’s certainly good to have that foundation.
———
Are you learning Chinese characters? Let me know in the comments!
Related posts:
