Being a Chinese teacher for many years and have met lots of foreign students who learn Mandarin in their spare time, they are not satisfied with only mastering common spoken Chinese to deal with daily life in China, they want to finally be able to read and write in Chinese as well.

But the characters ("han4 zi4" in Chinese) make lots of Chinese learners shrink back at the sight of them because they look so "complicated" and so different from spelling letters. As we all know, language learning is very time-consuming and energy-consuming, many foreigners may think of learning Chinese especially hard since it requires three times the learning time of another language using a Latin alphabet which is related to sounds (phonetics) because the writing of Chinese is "separate" from pronunciation. In some ways it is true but we all know that all languages are interrelated because all current people have the same ancestors on earth who invented human languages for communicating. So no matter how difficult and complex Chinese characters are, first of all, you should have confidence to master it!

Let me give you an example of analyzing an English word: "leer" means "a desirous, sly, or knowing look" when used as a noun. So it has something with one's eyes. What if you imagine the "l" as a bridge of a nose and the "ee" in the middle of the word as someone's eyes, and "r" as the direction of the expression in his eyes? So this word "leer" can be remembered not only by its meaning but also by its looking. It is a "picture character" in English. Now I give you a Chinese character as another example for comparison with this English word. The character shan (first tone, means mountain or hill) is a pictograph (called "xiang4 xing2 zi4" in Chinese. Pictograph means a picture representing a word or idea), it looks just like a mountain with three peaks!

Spelling languages like English, people could guess or pronounce a word directly from its writing but most foreigners may have the mistaken impression about Chinese characters which are so different from spelling languages at this point. In fact, about 80 percent of the characters are phonograms (called "xing2 sheng1 zi4" in Chinese). A phonogram character has one part representing meaning (this part is the radical of the character, called "bu4 shou3" in Chinese), the other part representing pronunciation. So at this point, Chinese characters are similar to spelling languages. Even if you are not sure what a character exactly means or how to pronounce correctly, you can guess the meaning from its radical and pronunciation from its "sound part". So by mastering radicals and some basic characters, you can overcome the difficulty of learning characters.

In fact, spelling languages like English, have their "radicals" to represent meanings too. For example: Many words which contain "frig" have the meaning of cold, such as frigid, refrigerator, refrigerant, etc. Many words which contain "integr" have the meaning of whole, such as integral, disintegrate, integer, integration, reintegration, etc. So it is reasonable that I say all languages are interrelated.

There is one common difficulty of any language learning including Chinese - it is how to correlate pronunciation, meaning and writing. As we all have our mother tongue, just try your best to use your imagination or "make stories" or any other kind of methods just for yourself to solve that problem. Everybody has his own way of remembering.

The last example of my article is an English word "baby" VS a Chinese word "bei1 bi3". The pronunciation of both words is almost the same but the Chinese word "bei1 bi3" means "base, mean, and contemptible". Can you make a story or correlate this meaning with an innocent new born baby to remember this Chinese word?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Apple Mao is an experienced Mandarin teacher and professional editor and author on the subject of online teaching and Chinese language e-book writing. Her website, http://www.AppleChineseOnline.com, provides a wealth of free Chinese audio programs and especially a very practical and easy-master character e-book which is suitable for anyone who is interested in learning Chinese writing.