Comment by iopq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iopq | Hacker News Reader

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They learn the characters by writing a line of each character repeatedly. It's a super inefficient method.

1. Once you have written it once, repeating the motion doesn't help you memorize it because it's in your short term memory. Memory research has shown that it's more efficient to review information when some time has passed.

2. There's no system that builds on the graphical similarities of the characters, or based on the frequency of said characters. You will get thematic grouping of 冷 (extremely common word meaning cold) and 霜 (a more rare word meaning frost)

In Chinese classes in China for foreigners they similarly just tell you to write the new character. There's no explanation of radicals or whatever, just some stroke order considerations (which is the least important info) and sometimes the character composition when it's not obvious.

The way that people who research the topic learn characters is far better - use an app that tells you to write in the correct character in a time-based repetition manner split by most common characters. Even better would be to build up characters by common shapes (not necessarily radicals since a lot of common shapes are not radicals)

> Once you have written it once, repeating the motion doesn't help you memorize it because it's in your short term memory. Memory research has shown that it's more efficient to review information when some time has passed.

Memory research has shown that if you have a fixed number of repetitions and want to maximize recall in the long term, spacing practice out over time is better than massed practice once at the beginning but that same research also shows that if you have a fixed time interval, more repetitions are better than fewer. (The recall curve for massed practice starts higher but drops faster than spaced repetition.)

Making children write the same character ten times is about making sure they'll still remember next lesson, not so much about making them remember for years. The long-term part is handled by implicit spaced repetition due to occasional exposure in assigned texts and their own reading for entertainment.

For learning a foreign language, explicit spaced repetition is more necessary, because learners are rarely exposed to enough content to benefit from the implicit spaced repetition effect.

Well, it doesn't even work for the next lesson because repeating something in your short term memory doesn't do anything. I've tried it. You can write it a hundred times and still forget it in two days (been there, done that). Or you could do a flash card and first try to remember the character without seeing it. Then when you review it tomorrow (in the same way, first get the defition/pronunciation and try to REMEMBER), you will remember it somewhat without seeing it first and will be able to get started on writing it, maybe even remember the rest of it.

It seems like your criticism is that writing a character repeatedly doesn't help you recall which characters to use for a given word, with which I'll heartily agree – practice doesn't tend to make you better at things you aren't practicing.

But that's not what writing drills are about in the first place. Keep in mind native speakers are already advanced users of the spoken language by the time they're beginning to read and write, and the mechanical task of writing (just putting down the right strokes in the right order) requires relatively more effort. That's what the writing drills are supposed to help practice, and I think they work just fine for that purpose.

If you create flashcards that just show you a character and your task is to recreate it on paper, you may find that writing it repeatedly instead of just once helps you do better tomorrow. (Just at this task, which you may not care about much.)

Similarly, if you review your definition/pronunciation → character flashcards multiple times on the same day (e.g. in Anki by choosing "again" or "hard" for new cards, or by using the "cram" feature) you should be more likely to remember tomorrow. (This might also not be something you care about, unless you have an important test tomorrow – which is probably what Anki supports "cramming" for.)

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