Strategies for learning Chinese vocabulary: 01

Chinese is generally considered to be a difficult language to learn.  

    I, therefore, teach my students strategies like mnemonics, or logical deduction.

    For the vocabulary exercise, the format I use is:

1. I present the word / compound / expression in Chinese characters.

2. I get the students to give the pinyin (romanisation) for each of the characters (this is for testing / practising character recognition).

3. I go through the literal breakdown of the word / compound / expression -- by asking them for it, or  giving it (/some of it) if they don't know.

4. I go through the final polished English translation -- by asking them for it, or giving it if they don't know. 

    An example of how I present it to them:

汽车

?pinyin

?literal breakdown

?polished English translation

What next, either coming from the students or from me, is:

汽车

pinyin: qì chē

literal breakdown: "vapour vehicle"

polished English translation: car / (US usage) automobile

    I run through this routine every single lesson for vocabulary, not just for the character recognition and English translation parts, but more to drill into them the meanings of the individual characters in a cluster, so that when the different characters pop up elsewhere in combination with another character, the students would (/should) recognise it (the individual meaning) and use it to help them guess at the meaning of the whole cluster / compound.

For example:

汽车 qì chē / "vapour vehicle":  they shouldn't just learn 汽车 as "car" without doing a literal breakdown.  They need to know that 汽 means "vapour", so that when it crops up elsewhere in combination with another character, it'll help them guess the meaning, e.g., 汽水 qì shuǐ / "vapour water" = soft (/ fizzy) drink.

马车 mǎ chē / "horse vehicle":  if they'd learned the individual meaning of 马 mǎ / horse, then they ought to arrive at "horse vehicle" = cart, which is not a car at all.

    It might sound like a lot of work going through all these steps every single time, but this is, in the long term, the best way as it'll give them the tool for guessing when they come across a new combination.

    The written equivalent would be:  learning the Chinese script (rather than the romanisation only) would then make parsing much easier later, e.g. (just two for now), zuò could be 

* 做 / to make; 

* 坐 / to sit.  

"wǒ zuò" could be "I make / I sit", so the reader would have to stand back and look at the context before s/he can decide which one it should be, whilst 我做 / 我坐 would be clear right from the first glance.

    The above is, of course, a case of "Do you want the good news first or the bad news first?".

* Do you want an easy life to start with (learning only the romanisation), but end up spending more time trying to parse instances like "wǒ zuò"? 

OR

* Do you want to put in the hard grind first and end up being able to do the Chinese character sort-of-equivalent of sight reading (/ prima vista) for music?

    An English equivalent would be knowing that a word ending in -ology is to do with "a subject of study or a branch of knowledge", which would make parsing so much easier.  A new word ending in -ology would at least point the reader in the direction of a field of study, not something that can be eaten, say. 

    This way of going about it can also turn learning into a game, a fun thing, i.e., see how close you can get to the actual meaning by guessing a new word using this principle.

    This isn't the only strategy, of course -- there'll be others for different aspects of a language.