Lack of Characters Questions - Mandarin

Community-Created Courses Chinese
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Hi, came in a few months ago on Memrise, really dive in and even took the membership.
However, I think a great improvement and one that could easily be done would be to : emphasize the learning capabilities on the Chinese Characters .
I think it would be better to make them bigger (like the Pinyin translation) in order to picture better the characters and do more questions (were it to be) on them of course ! . Pinyin is after all just a help for us foreigners but the real Chinese world is not written in Pinyin …
Of course I m using other apps that solves this but Memrise Chinese would benefit so much from that…

Ty ! have a nice one
Maxime

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there are so many Hanzi / Chinese characters on Memrise, you could try some…

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Try any of the courses that are not the Memrise official Mandarin courses. You will see an emphasis on learning the pronunciation of the characters, as well as their English/(Your native language) meaning depending on the course you use. Try any of the HSK courses for starters, and if you want to learn more specific vocabulary choose a more specific course. If you have any other questions let me know.

I think Memrise has been a good platform for learning Chinese characters/ Chinese words, and has been the most effective tool to getting me past the intermediate level in reading Chinese.

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Hi @MaximeVerbena28 :slight_smile: It’s nice of you to post some feedback, but honestly, team Memrise very rarely listens to suggestions like these.

Anyway, I wish you well in your studies of Chinese! As you mentioned, Memrise isn’t really a complete resource for learning for Chinese, but with some supplemental resources, it’s pretty awesome :slight_smile:

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Thanks for your replies.
@neoncube I certainly will.
Have great day :slight_smile:

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Agreed. I would like the official Mandarin course materials to present both Pinyin and hanzi on all entries by default.

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hey @MaximeVerbena28, just to emphasize some steps that @roflcopterlol mentioned, there’s a lot of ways you can take, but if you don’t have a solid path laid out, here’s what you can do:

Go to the memrise website, as it allows better search capabilities. Go to the Chinese courses and then the HSK courses.
Do this one
HSK 1

then this one
HSK 2

then this one
HSK 3

These have a testing direction of showing you Chinese and you typing the English, and also showing you the Chinese and you typing the pinyin.

After HSK 3, this testing format is BLUE HSK (the course picture is blue)
There will also be a RED HSK (the course picture is red) that show English and you will type in the Chinese character (you’ll need to turn on Chinese typing on your computer or keyboard).
I highly recommend you to take both BLUE and RED for HSK 4 and 5 (and also 6, but there are multiple ways to go about that).

HSK 4 RED
HSK 4 BLUE
HSK 5 RED
HSK 5 BLUE

From the very beginning, track your grammar learning by learning new key points from Chinese Grammar Wiki. Go to a section (A1, A2, B1…etc.) and learn through all the points one at a time.
Chinese Grammar Wiki Website

There are also Grammar Wiki memrise courses set up that test the points. Here’s the first one:
A1

Pace yourself with everything. If you have no work or school, then go crazy. Otherwise start yourself at ~5 characters a day consistently and work up from there if you’re still okay after a week or two. (The real test is whether you can handle the review backlog.)

Learning Chinese is a very big investment in vocabulary. I’ve learned after originally “just wanting to be able to speak fluently” that everything ties together and you need to learn all this vocab along with the colloquial stuff.

If you need to practice listening, go to popup Chinese, make a free account, and you can listen to their lessons for free. You can pay if you want to download them. Hands down the best resource for listening to how Chinese is really spoken in the mainland.

To practice writing, download TOFU learn on your mobile as an app or use it online. Learn at least 100-200 characters (or learn them all) as you learn vocabulary in the HSK courses in memrise. When you try to recall something in your brain, it will rely on the different ways you learned. Listening (passive), Speaking (active), Writing (active), Reading (passive) all reinforce each other. This is why using the red & blue courses are important. Learning to actively write by drawing on your mobile helps the active part of your brain, as well as cementing the building blocks that will be used in thousands more characters you learn. Instead of new characters being batshit out of left field, now they are cow+water, cow+word, etc.

Let me know if you have any questions or need any more tools.