Learn Foreign Languages

Let’s take “Ren” as an example. It means “people” in Chinese. But it functions more like “man” in English. Da Ren, literally “big man”, means adults. Gong Ren, “working man” literally, means “workers”. Shang Ren is businessman. You can see the picture here, right?

This way your vocabulary is accumulated naturally and quickly without having to memorize new characters.

Key characters that are used frequently shall come to your plan first because they appear in articles too often to be neglected. Trust me the quantity of this type of characters is much less than that in English.

Studies have shown the following facts about the frequency that Chinese words are used.
The 10 Chinese characters that are used most frequently, occupies 15% of the text. That is to say, you would probably see one or more of them appearing now and then for 15 times in every 100 words you read in Chinese.

The good news is that there are around 500 characters that belong to this family. 75 characters of 100 in an article are of the group. Maybe you cannot see their meaning exactly due to the meaning variations when combined together with others, but you might have a good chance in guessing because of the relationship between the single meanings and the collective meaning. And you are the winner most of the time.

Just imagine you are only 500 characters away from conducting fluent conversations with Chinese people and reading Chinese newspapers as well as surfing for Chinese information on line.

So we are coming back to the question that we asked at the beginning of the last post in this series. Is it really difficult to learn Chinese? Probably yes. Is it really hard to learn and master 500 characters? Absolutely no.