1. Why am I learning words?
If there is over 50,000 characters, this surely isn’t the most efficient way to learn?
How many characters should I know?

2. What is to 'know' Chinese
Characters?
● To memorise and write from memory?
This is the traditional way and what they tell you
at school.
This is only useful for exams.

3. What is to 'know' Chinese
Characters?
● How about to recognise and know the meaning of
words?
That’s the modern way to go about learning
characters. But how do you begin to recognise
words? You first have to know how to input any word
into an App like Pleco.
There’s two ways to input words, either use PInYing
or Handwriting but if you can’t recognise the word and
hence pronounce it, you can’t use PinYin.

4. What is to 'know' Chinese
Characters?
So we must start with handwriting.
Apps recognise that Chinese Characters have stroke order which is
why, if you randomly drew a Character into the apps, it probably
won’t come up quickly if at all.
This is why in the beginning we need to write Chinese Characters
just for the sake of getting a feel for stroke orders.
We can’t memorise the stroke order for every word and even
Chinese people sometimes write a stroke or two in the wrong order
but as long as the order is mostly correct you’ll have no trouble.

5. Here's what reality is like:
The above table tells us that the top 1000 characters account for between 86% and
91% of the characters occurring in the real world.
Source: http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/topchars.php

6. The learning Curve for Chinese isn't
that steep. . .
● We're going to continue writing words. I'll just write
words, you will copy and then after the class, you
will go to The App and find out what they mean, the
PinYin and how to pronounce it.
● Once you can look at a newspaper and quickly and
confidently input a character, then I would say you
can stop writing Chinese Characters.
● THIS DOESN'T MEAN YOU STOP READING AND
LOOKING THEM UP!

7. The more Chinese characters you
look up, the more Chinese you will
come to recognise, understand and
pronounce.
You don't need to memorise words or
stroke order.
Later, you'll realise that learning the
PinYin and recognising characters
(rather than memorising them) is the
most important!