The most frustrating part of studying Chinese…
Actually, the whole thing can be pretty damn frustrating. But my complaint of the day centers around characters and my way of studying. We’re given dialogues in Chinese that we go over every day. So the night before, I go through my book and try to read over the dialogues and figure out what it’s saying and what it means. The frustrating part is finding characters that I don’t remember from previous classes. While I’m sorta proud to say that by now I can instantly recognize maybe 40-60% of the ones we’ve learned so far, there are still those that I’m certain we never learned. I absolutely suck with the radical index as well, so the dictionary doesn’t really do me any good. So I spend the next 30 minutes flipping through vocab from previous lessons trying to find that godforsaken character.
While it literally draws a relatively simple dialogue into a multi-hour study session, I think the process – although hugely inefficient – into a worthwhile time. It’s really satisfying being able to go through the whole dialogue by myself. And I think that it also helps me remember the character better than other ways.
That being said, any advice on how to cut down the time it takes to find the characters? Any studying tips?