汉字记不住

Leo, here, take the pen.

What for?

Write a character. Any one you like, the one you know best.

Right now?

Right now. You get five seconds.

Hang on, let me think.

Time's up.

Xiao Yue, give me a second. The character is right there in my head.

What you have is what it looks like.

Right, I can see its shape, but my hand has no idea which stroke comes first.

And that is exactly what we're talking about today.

This is so embarrassing. I've studied that character at least three hundred times.

It's not embarrassing. And let me say one thing that might make you feel better.

Go ahead.

I might not be able to write that character either.

You? You're Chinese.

Chinese people forget too. We'll get into that in a bit.

Xiao Yue, characters have been the most crushing part of these two years.

I know. You've told me that several times.

I've memorized over two thousand characters. Pick one at random and ask me to write it, I could probably manage two hundred.

So where did the other eighteen hundred go?

No idea. They leaked out of my head like water.

Let me ask you something first. You say you can't remember them, but what kind of can't remember?

What do you mean?

There are several kinds. You have to know which one you have before you know which medicine to take.

There are different kinds?

Yes. At least three.

Go on, I'll see which one is me.

Number one. I write the character down, you recognize it, but if you have to write it yourself, you can't.

That's me. A hundred percent me.

Number two. You learn it today, you look at it tomorrow, and your mind is completely blank.

Also me.

Number three. You remember one character, but the one next to it that looks almost the same starts fighting with it.

Xiao Yue, you're describing my entire life.

Then you've got all three. But these three are completely different problems.

How are they different?

The first one is passive recognition. Your eyes know it, your hand doesn't.

Familiar to the eye, foreign to the hand.

Exactly. And that one isn't actually a disease.

Not a disease?

I'll tell you why in a minute. The second one means you've never actually used it.

But I memorized it.

Memorizing isn't using. You copied it twenty times in a notebook, and it never once made it into a sentence of yours.

And the third one?

The third one is that you learned them separately. Characters that look alike should be learned together, but you learned one a week.

Isn't that clearer?

No. You can only see the difference when they're side by side.

Okay, let me finish the first question. You said eye-familiar, hand-foreign isn't a disease. What do you mean?

I mean you may have set the wrong goal from the very beginning.

Isn't my goal to be able to write characters?

Let me turn it around. When was the last time you actually wrote Chinese with a pen?

Let me think. Last month, I think, signing for a delivery.

Did you sign your English name or your Chinese name?

English name. I'm afraid of getting my Chinese name wrong.

And when you chat with Chinese friends, what do you use?

My phone. I type pinyin.

And when you type, the moment the pinyin comes up, you pick one from a row of characters, right?

Yeah, I get it right at a glance.

Then you can already do it.

But that's multiple choice.

In China today, ninety percent of everyday Chinese is multiple choice.

Really?

Really. How much do I write in a day? Apart from my signature, almost nothing.

Doesn't that make you rusty?

It does. We even have a set phrase for it: you pick up the pen and the character is gone.

Pick up the pen and the character is gone. So the pen goes up and it's just not there?

Right. The tip is already touching the paper, and the character falls apart in your head.

This happens to Chinese people too?

All the time. Let me tell you something about myself, and you'll feel much better.

Please, go on.

You know the handwritten price board in my shop?

The little blackboard, yeah.

It has a blueberry mille-feuille on it. I wrote the character for berry wrong.

Wrong how?

I added one extra stroke under the grass radical and turned it into a completely different character.

How long was it up?

Two weeks. All those customers coming and going every day, and not one of them said anything.

So who finally noticed?

A foreign customer who was learning Chinese. He stood in front of the board for a long time, then asked me very carefully whether that character might be wrong.

He was too embarrassed to say it.

He was blushing. He was afraid he was the one who had it wrong.

And it turned out the owner had it wrong.

It turned out the girl from Hangzhou who runs the dessert shop had it wrong. So really, don't feel bad about not being able to write that character today.

Xiao Yue, I feel a lot better now.

But let me finish the thought. I'm not telling you to give up handwriting.

Then what are you saying?

I'm saying you should swap one big goal for two small ones.

Which two?

One, recognize it when you see it. Two, type it when you want to say it.

And handwriting?

Save handwriting for a small set, twenty to fifty characters, enough to sign your name, fill in a form, write a card.

Twenty to fifty? I always thought it had to be two thousand.

You want to recognize two thousand and write fifty. Those two numbers are very far apart, and so is how exhausting they are.

Xiao Yue, that one sentence may have just saved me a year.

So next time you say you can't remember, ask yourself first: can't recognize, or can't write?

Those are two different things.

Completely different. Not recognizing is the real problem. Not being able to write usually isn't.

Okay, let's talk about recognizing. How do I make it stick?

From here on it's the actual method. First thing, you need to change one idea.

Which idea?

Right now you're memorizing characters as if they were pictures, aren't you?

Yes. I look at the shape and copy it over and over.

That's why they leak. A picture has no parts. You can only memorize the whole thing.

So characters have parts?

They do. And most characters are assembled from them.

Assembled?

Let me give you an example. Do you know the character for invite?

I do.

What about the one in clear water?

That one too.

The one in sunny day, and the one in mood?

All of them.

Those four characters, the right side is the same, isn't it?

They all have that same piece.

And how do they sound?

Pretty similar, actually.

That's what I mean by parts. That piece on the right is telling you the sound.

So when I see that piece, I roughly know how it's pronounced?

Nine times out of ten.

And the left side?

The left side tells you what it's about. Three dots means water, so that one is clear water.

The sun radical means sun, so that one is sunny.

Right. The heart radical is about the heart, so that one is mood.

Xiao Yue, nobody has ever explained this to me.

Your teachers never covered it?

They covered radicals, but they just made us memorize a radical chart. Nobody told me the two parts have different jobs.

One handles meaning, one handles sound. Eight or nine out of every ten characters are built this way.

So when I meet a new character, I can actually guess?

You can. And it's fine to guess wrong. The act of guessing is what helps you remember.

Why does guessing wrong still help?

Because when you guess, your brain is active. When you copy something twenty times, your brain is switched off.

Let me test this. Are all the three-dots characters about water?

Give me a few and I'll tell you.

River, sea, wine, soup.

All correct.

Hang on, the one in take a shower is too.

It is. See? You're already using it.

What about the hand radical?

The hand radical is about what hands do. Hit, hold, look for, push.

Those really are all things hands do.

And the foot radical? You guess.

Feet? Run, jump.

And road.

Xiao Yue, it feels like these two years I've been collecting fragments, and you're stringing them together.

They were always strung together. Nobody gave you the thread.

Then let me ask something greedier. I get the parts now, but what if I still can't remember?

Then use the second method: make up a story.

A story?

Turn the parts into an image. Here's the simplest one, the character for rest.

The left side is a person.

And the right?

Wood. A tree.

A person leaning against a tree, doing what?

Resting!

Will you ever forget that one again?

Never. That's ridiculously easy.