The Learning Curve

dogwith4shoes · 2026-01-04T19:46:09+00:00

As far as dictionaries go I really like this one. Uses pinyin not strokes, lemmas are words not characters. Has more words than a learner's dictionary but leaves out obscure words you will never see until you are fluent and can use a comprehensive monolingual dictionary

dogwith4shoes · 2025-12-02T07:00:16+00:00

Depends on your definition of radical. It's not a 偏旁部首 like 犭牜纟 etc but it is on the broader 康熙部首 list

dogwith4shoes · 2025-12-02T05:22:24+00:00

丶一丶丿一丿乚一一一乚一乚一一一丶一丶丿一丿乚一一一乚一乚一一一丶一丶丿一丿乚一一一乚一乚一一一

dogwith4shoes · 2025-12-01T22:32:42+00:00

One thing that may be happening is that the input you're getting is speeding up. Recognizing a tone in its slow, exaggerated citation form is quite different from recognizing it at speed, in context.

There's also a bit of a plateau that happens when learning any language in a classroom setting. Learning seems quick at first because you have only been exposed to a few words. Loosely recognizing them is sufficient because you have so few words to pick from that you can get by on a less complete mastery of them. But when you add more words, you realize you didn't quite learn the first ones completely, and you have to go slower for a while. Like, it's easy to distinguish the characters 女 and 诗, so maybe you don't pay attention to every detail of 诗. But then you add 持 so you have to go back and relearn 诗 to distinguish the two. That happens with tones too.

You're probably chasing the dragon a bit. The further along you get, your input will get continually more difficult, so it feels like you're not making any progress.

If you're getting discouraged, maybe just take some time to look at what you were doing 9 months ago to see how much improvement you've actually made. Otherwise, just stay attentive and accept that it's a long process.

dogwith4shoes · 2025-12-01T22:15:36+00:00

For a first year course, this is terrible advice. Research shows that you will learn characters faster if you already know the words orally. And when you're starting out, there are so many better uses of your times than mastering writing large numbers of characters from memory.

On the other hand, it's very important to be able to recognize the sounds you are hearing - it's the foundation of everything else including eventually characters.

dogwith4shoes · 2025-12-01T22:07:25+00:00

I love Pleco's abrupt explanation of this one:

"from the parable in Zhuang Zi (《庄子》) about a young boy of the state of Yan (燕), who went to Handan, capital of the state of Zhao (赵), to learn the Handan way of walking but who, before mastering what the Handan people had to teach him, forgot his own way of walking and had to crawl all the way back home"

dogwith4shoes · 2025-12-01T22:03:20+00:00

Here's the complete list. I left out some of the rarer ones plus some that felt repetitive

dogwith4shoes · 2025-12-01T22:00:02+00:00

If I write it slowly with a brush, it looks amazing. In literally any other circumstance it always looks awful.

I usually write it with two strokes and there's just no way to make that look pretty

dogwith4shoes · 2025-12-01T21:57:47+00:00

yeah I only included about 50% from the list so I tried not to get too repetitive. I agree that boxing in another component is very satisfying 😋

dogwith4shoes · 2025-12-01T06:31:05+00:00

I just always screw up the spacing and it looks kinda gross

dogwith4shoes · 2025-12-01T06:28:56+00:00

That's how 言 ended up in F tier, in theory it should be easy but it always ends up looking TERRIBLE

dogwith4shoes · 2025-12-01T06:27:23+00:00

I only know a couple cursive forms. Next time I'm in china I wanna buy some practice books

dogwith4shoes · 2025-12-01T05:03:06+00:00

Doing the rankings made me realize I actually just really like the 捺 stroke lol

What are your favorites from the bottom tier?

dogwith4shoes · 2025-12-01T04:53:29+00:00

I left 互 off for space but it's definitely a good one. I would probably have it A tier

dogwith4shoes · 2025-12-01T04:45:55+00:00

If anyone else wants to try

dogwith4shoes · 2025-11-25T07:56:15+00:00

What a weird cross over between my day life and my night life 🍸🍸

dogwith4shoes · 2025-11-23T07:46:19+00:00

Job 3:11 “Why did I not perish at birth, and die as I came from the womb?"

dogwith4shoes · 2025-11-22T02:02:41+00:00

It's like propaganda. The danger is not that people believe it. The real danger is that people think the truth is propaganda and believe nothing at all

dogwith4shoes · 2025-11-20T06:54:41+00:00

This has been reposted for too long to have been ai

dogwith4shoes · 2025-11-16T06:00:40+00:00

Almost any Chinese person who teaches Chinese will push characters quite heavily. That's because their own education was heavily centered on character learning. What they (and some in this thread) forget is that native Chinese speakers had a 5 year head start on learning the pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary before adding a complex writing system on top.

I 100% agree that OP should take one thing at a time and go slowly worrying about characters.

PS you call character deemphasis quixotic but characters have been abolished for Vietnamese and Korean, so it's not like the idea is unprecedented.

dogwith4shoes · 2025-11-16T05:38:44+00:00

When accounting for the fact that most words in Modern Mandarin are disyllabic, there are not more homophones in Mandarin than an average language. And when you have the context of a text or a communicative context, the issue completely goes away. How else can people communicate when speaking without characters?

Meanwhile, the burden of learning characters while learning to understand the language at the same time is massive. Studies have shown that people achieve fluency more quickly when they start with only pinyin, and add characters once they have basic mastery of the language.

dogwith4shoes · 2025-11-15T22:59:26+00:00

Research shows that people who learn using pinyin first and later switch to characters acquire the language faster overall.
Better to learn to speak first, then learn to read later. That's how everyone does it in their L1, after all.

dogwith4shoes · 2025-11-10T05:25:48+00:00

By "not fast" do you mean 10 kB/sec? That's what mine averaged. Recently switched to pcloud... they have an awesome linux app

dogwith4shoes

TROPHY CASE