I am trying to learn Chinese and am having no real problems with the spoken language so far (tones are actually much easier to deal with than I anticipated), but I am a complete idiot when it comes to remembering characters.  I will study them over and over again, write them out, use flash cards, etc., then, a couple of weeks later, the characters look almost as alien to me as they did at first and I don’t have clue what they say.

This is depressing and I am starting to think I should just give up and focus on only the spoken language, at least until I get some fluency (my plan is to work through all of the Pimsleur sets and then get a human tutor).  

I am starting to think that gaining oral fluency in both Mandarin and, say, Japanese would probably take no more time than it would to attain oral and written fluency in either one of the languages.

Any thoughts anyone?

Thanks

—Mark

Hi Mark!
I understand how you are feeling, because I’m in the same situation..
For me it has been useful to read about the pictograms that gave origin to the characters. I know that if you are studying the simplified way of writing (as myself) it’s difficcult to recognise anything on them, but at least it has helped me out.
My problem comes when I have to write… It’s easier to read!
My main interest is being able to speak the language, but I also want to read and write. This morning I was talking to a woman from Fujian; it was difficcult to understand her accent, because she seemed to pronounce everything like an -l (the -r sound, of course; but even the -n sound…) So I was glad to be able to read what we were discussing..
Any suggestions helping us to improve our writing ability?

dama

The standard answer is to write each character 100 times… But it helps a lot if you have a teacher (or very good textbook) explaining radicals and phonetics, and giving examples of other characters using the same parts as the character you are learning. When you look up a word in a dictionary, take a look at the other words beginning with the same character. You won’t remember them all, of course, but it will add to the feeling for characters. And write your notes by hand! In the beginning I was too fascinated by how easy it was to use the computer. I could pick the correct characters when several were presented by the software for the pinyin input - but I didn’t learn how to write them myself. Disastruos. I must confess that I now don’t write 100 of them, but I certainly try to write new characters until I think that they are readable.

I don’t know if this will help, but Michael Rowley has written two books:Kanji and Kana Pictographix. I picked one of them up in a used bookstore as an art reference and found it an interesting way to learn to "see" some of the characters.
gailr

ps: BTW, both are in paperback, thanks to our old friend Aldus Manutius.
pps: This may look like a shameless plug for my own post, but of course, it is not! :D

My favourite book on Chinese characters is Cecilia Lindqvist: China, Empire of the Written Symbol. She takes around 150 of the oldest and most central characters of written Chinese and uses them as the foundation for an introduction to Chinese culture. Her readings and explanations are very well researched, and seem to me much more probable than what I have seen in an otherwise interesting book written by an Italian, whose name I don’t remember.

Thanks for the suggestions.

—Mark