How to memorize chinese characters? Any tips?

Chinese characters is one of the few hieroglyphics in existence, which is difficult for most people.

However, Chinese characters also have their own advantages, that is, the total number of characters is fixed and almost will not increase for new things, which means that you do not need to memorize new characters.

Regarding how to memorize Chinese Characters, I have 2 suggestions,


1, Know some basic knowledge about Chinese characters, eg, these 5 key points:
the features of Pictographic Characters,
the rules of Order of Strokes,
the Components,
the Radicals,
the 4 Principles of Creating.

Refer to these articles:
https://www.cchatty.com/Chinese-Characters-g-100017
https://www.cchatty.com/learn-to-write-chinese-characters-g-101538
https://www.cchatty.com/The-Formation-of-Chinese-Characters-g-100075
https://www.cchatty.com/how-to-learn-chinese-g-100042


2, Do some handwriting practice, with the tools, to generate the stroke animation and pdf copy to practice your writing skills,
https://www.cchatty.com/tools/chinese-strokes
https://www.cchatty.com/tools/chinese-copybook-generator


And some useful books about Chinese characters:
https://www.cchatty.com/pdf/1037
https://www.cchatty.com/pdf/2155
https://www.cchatty.com/pdf/1035
https://www.cchatty.com/pdf/1036
https://www.cchatty.com/pdf/1465

My tips is don't learn it with every single characters. Learn it rather then a phrase.
For example: 果汁. You can see fruit and water so it's reasonable to infer it's juice.

Memorizing each Hanzi through the coding method might be work.
For example, for the character "明”, I would say there is a sun, and the moon in the right side of it. Of course, a sun and moon both give us some "light".
So I can menorize the writing and meaning of the word better, and it would be even more fun when you paint a very small sun and moon beside eachother and name it with the character "明“ infront of it!

I started learning and memorizing them from observing the chinese radicals first. It helps a lot.

hi.you could find or creat some radical physical materials and put them together to form characters.cause there are serveral basic radicals used to form a complete character.
second you could search and find some videos about the history of each characters to help memorize the form and meaing of some simple characters.
third try Caligraphy sometimes to relax and have fun while learning Chinese.
fourth keep reading everyday cause reading is the best way to learn characters gradually and unconciously.
fifth if you know programming you can program some online games for learning characters,which i think would be the future of characters learning.

One thing you should consider is using a flashcard program like ANKI. Writing it out again and again may mean that you are wasting effort, you should only review things as much as you need to.

When setting up the flashcards link some words to pictures and words in seperate flashcards. Example:

[Pictutre of two people, one taller than the other, arrow pointing at the tall person] -> 高

Tall -> 高

You may want to make them into multiple choice cards, as english words can overlap with multiple chinese characters and vice versa. And when you add another word that has a similar meaning it may confuse you if you are simply matching word to word a better format would be;

Which character best matches the word Tall?
1. 高
2. 大
3. 长
4. 小

Another good format would be image occlusion, where you have to guess what word is behind the occlusion.

Example: Picture of market stall, each fruit is labeled with the chinese word, one label is blocked out, you have to guess the word for apple (苹果).

Limit the card number per day, and make sure you do it every day, also add cards that tell you to write out the character.

Diversity of methods tends to be the best teacher, as your brain can make a new memory for each type of card.

Start with easier ones. Then slowly move on to harder ones. You will soon realised that the harder words are usually made up by the easier ones