This is a follow-up to the repetitive methods. Again, don’t forget the three aspects of a character you have to learn:

1. the pronunciation
2. the writing
3. the meaning

Now, here are some creative learning methods for learning new characters.

Analyze its structure

When you encounter a new character, this is something you should always do! Ask yourself: Is there a radical? Where is the radical positioned? How could I divide the character? Left - right (左右结构) or top - bottom (上下结构) or even left - middle - right or top - middle - bottom or is one part surrounded by another part (包围结构)? Before you get all confused and wonder what I’m talking about, here are some examples:

• 左右结构：结 构 林 好 你 她 情 吗 福
• 上下结构：草 安 实 学 爱 买
• 左中右结构：树 谢 街 游 微 做
• 上中下结构：棠 素 堂 喜
• 包围结构：国 围 园 圆 区 建 过 起

Make sense of it

After you analyzed its structure you should try to understand it or create a mnemonics. Chinese characters have a long history and they symbolize their meaning. You only have to find the connection! Its hard to tell you a general formula to do this, so I’ll just give you some examples:

• 中 (zhōng)：it means “middle” and there is a line going straight through the middle of the rectangle.
• 好 (hǎo)：means “good” and consists of 女 and 子. So a good mnemonic is that having both a daughter (女) and a son (子) is good. 女 + 子 = 好
• 忍 (rěn)：means “to endure”. It consists or a 刃 and 心. So it represents the edge of a blade (刃) on your heart (心). Or if you don’t know 刃, you could also picture a knife (刀) on your heart (心) which would logically cause it to bleed (丶). So it’s 刃 + 心 = 忍 or 刀 + 心 + 丶= 忍
• 碧 (bì)：it consists of 王 白 石. There is a popular mnemonic: 王先生，白先生，一同坐在石头上。Mr Wang (王) and Mr Bai (白) are sitting on a stone (石) together.

Mind mapping

Creating mind maps with similar characters is another very efficient learning method, because our brain works with associations and when we connect new characters to known characters, it will help us remember the new vocabulary. There are several different mind maps you can try out:

Think of similar looking characters

Do a general brain storming for characters that look similar and that are easy to confuse. For example:
日 –> 口 目 白 田

Think of similar sounding characters

There are many characters that look different and have different meanings, but are pronounced the same way. They are also very easy to confuse. For example:
是 –> 十 四 死 事 时

Break the character apart and form new ones with its components

This is a very helpful way to organize your learned characters. Otherwise you will just have an incoherent mess of characters in your brain ;) For example:
借 –> 亻：们 他 值 依 似 忆 and –> 昔：错 惜 醋 措 腊 蜡

组词造句

This is a very common and helpful exercise because you are applying what you learned. It means that you think of expressions that contain this character (组词) and form sentences (造句). Thus, it’s a very efficient learning-by-doing approch. For example:
今 –> 今天 –> 我们这里今天开始下雪了。

I hope these tips were helpful and if you have some more tips for memorizing characters, feel free to share them!

Related Posts:

• How to memorize Chinese characters I (repetitive methods)
• Howto get a nice Chinese handwriting
• Writing Chinese with wubi 五笔

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