Declutter
Decluttering the mind requires us to become intentional on where we place our attention and how we spend our time and energy.
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Get Organised to Free Up Mental Space
Here are the ways we help you to declutter your mind to learn Chinese
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1. Identify What is Essential to Learn and Prioritise
Determine if you are learning simplifed or traditional Chinese characters. This series of books focus on simplified Chinese characters only.
Focus on one task at a time and clear away everything else. Learn to 'see' before learning how to speak, read and write. Focusing on appearance is easier to start and master and this will give you confidence to continue. Pronunciation requires more time as you need to train the muscles in your tongue and attune your ears to the new sounds.
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2. See Patterns and Build Easy Storage and Retrieval
If you are able to notice patterns in characters, you can develop a way to classify and store them. Learn a systematic way of storing and retrieving characters by their appearance.
3. Make it Manageable
When you know that what you need to learn is finite, that is there is a fixed number of alphabets that you need to learn, you will have more confidence to manage your learning. For instance, in English there are only 26 alphabets and all words must be formed with them and they are always arranged from left to right.
For Chinese language, if you know that there is a fixed number parts that you are going to encounter, you will find that each new character you learn are made up of parts you are familiar and it is not a totally new encounter. You know where the boundaries are, as there will not be new encounters that will surprise or stress you.
4. Apply 80/20 Rule
Instead of learning a few thousands characters, learn 200 over alphabets which can be classified into 32 stroke patterns!
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Instead of learning every possible structures of Chinese characters, learn only the basic structures and how they can be applied to decipher characters with more complex structures in subsequent books.
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5. Put Routine Work on Auto-Pilot Mode
If you know that there are standard ways to decipher characters and write them, you can build routines that train you to work on an auto-pilot mode without much effort. Efforts can be diverted for other learning.
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6. Break Old Habits
Turn unmindful writing practices into purposeful learning activities. Engage yourself through other modes of learning (e.g. hands-on activities; colorful visual graphics). Discard old memories that hinder your learning.
7. Reflection
Reflecting on what you have just learnt help you to consolidate the knowledge you have just picked up. Relating what you have learnt to the languages you know and your own experiences could help you gain different perspectives.
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Reflection work could also become good summary of what you have learnt and can be used for easy quick reference later. Do not skip this. Answers not provided though.
Introduction
Learn Through Colours
All the Chinese alphabets can be written within six strokes. The minimum number of strokes is two.
Colours are used to show the sequence of strokes visually. You will be able to see the stroke pattern of the alphabets at a glance and notice any slight differences between them. Compare the coloured alphabet with the black-and-white one, which shows more details?
With colours, you can learn the alphabets visually. Close your eye and visualise them in your mind and ‘write’ them in the air with your index finger. Instead of writing, you can colour the strokes in sequence to remember the stroke order.
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Why...
Since the invention of writing, the world has been transformed and our minds have been extended. Our ability to write help us to pass on our knowledge and inspiration and enhance our appreciation of the world and our capacities for learning and communication.
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Quick Characters Recognition
Like in other languages, the need to write by hand has greatly diminished but the need to recognise words or characters is as important. Even with the aid of electronic devices that limit the range of words to choose from when inputting text, our grasp of the language still depends on our ability to recognise and use words. Our books focus on building the ability to learn visually by seeing patterns and colours in characters which will increase the accuracy and speed of character recognition.
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Play Chinese Word Games
Another reason for doing this is it is difficult to 'play' Chinese characters. You can name so many English word games (crossword puzzles, scrabble, boggle, word search) that help you learn and remember words through fun but you can hardly find any Chinese word games, mainly due the complexities and lack of common elements of Chinese characters (due to the way it has been taught till now). Hence, you can see that the fun of playing Chinese characters is still yet to be explored. Discovering the Chinese Alphabets of Chinese characters laid the foundation for such possibilities to materialise some day.
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When Chinese language can be made easier for all people, more people will be exposed to another world of thinking, hence extending another of our capability.
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It’s Easy! It’s Intuitive!
Look at these symbols. Make a good guess and match each group to a suitable name based on their appearance.
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Clutter
To declutter, there must be a 'clutter' in the first place. As many people would have experienced ... the more possessions they own, the more time and effort is required to organise and maintain them. From time to time, they have to throw out stuff they do not need—part of the process of decluttering.
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There are thousands of Chinese characters. Unlike English, which can be organised alphabetically, there is no easy way to organise characters for easy memory. When you acquire Chinese characters without a systematic way to 'store' them in your memory, you will have trouble retrieving them when you need them. It is like piling up your physical possessions without an organised storage and retrieval system. This book helps you to DECLUTTER and get organised!
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What is a clutter?
CLUTTER is
- A confusing or disorderly state or collection and a possible symptom of compulsive hoarding.
- To fill or cover with scattered things
- To jumble
- To fill or litter with things in a disorderly manner
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'PILE' OF CHARACTERS
For many new learners, the more characters they 'collect', the higher the pile of characters become—unorganised and unreachable.
Why does your mind get 'cluttered' when learning Chinese?
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Poorly Defined Scope of Learning
In some books, websites and forums, writers provided advice without differentiating between simplified and traditional Chinese characters. Worse still some even provided advice spanning across several East Asian languages (e.g. Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and Cantonese). Even though there are many common characters in these languages, they are very different languages in terms of pronunciation and the range of characters used. Some of the characters in one language could appear to be very alien to speakers of another language.
Sometimes, even when the same characters are used, the meaning could be very different. For example. these characters are used in Chinese and Japanese but they have different meanings and pronunciation.
You also need to differentiate between simplified and traditional Chinese characters, the former are derived from the latter. Characters sharing the same meaning could be written very differently.
Poor Storage and Retrieval System
A good storage and retrieval system for anything —physical or mental—requires well-thought designs that take into consideration all the possibilities. It needs to have a clear framework and easy-to-understand guidelines so that everyone stores and retrieves things the same way.
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Sadly, it has always been difficult to classify Chinese characters. The common classification methods are by sound or parts (radicals) or stroke count. Chinese characters were not classified by appearance. Hence, when you encounter a new character that you do not know its meaning and pronunciation, it is difficult to look up this character in a paper dictionary or to key it into an electronic device. You have to know how to pronounce the character or break it down into its components, which can be difficult for beginners.
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When learning gets messy, your mind becomes cluttered, as a result you may lose confidence in learning and get really frustrated. You may find that learning Chinese is difficult because there is no order or systematic learning. The more characters you acquire, the higher the stack of characters piled up. They take up a lot of your memory space, like a computer that has not done defragmentation for a long time. Even though you know these characters, you will find it difficult to recall them when you need them.
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Why you need to 'declutter your mind to learn Chinese'?
MENTAL CLUTTER gets in the way of being able to think clearly and focus on what really matters.
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Without a mental map of Chinese characters, it is difficult to see the similarities and differences between characters. The brain gets cluttered when more characters are added.
