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Depending on how 'in touch' with the language (in terms of understanding grammatical constructions and context clues) you may be considered fairly fluent with 80% or so character recognition Think about your vocabulary in English. If you pick up a book with many words you dont know, you may still be able to comprehend it based on the context of the words ...

You can use a SRS (Spaced Repetition System) software, I personally use Anki to create a deck of study cards and I review them on my mobile phone. I also recommend Memrise.

I generated a bunch of files for some flashcard software that uses spaced repetition to help you learn efficiently. It's still a lot of work to memorize the flash cards, but I don't know of anything easier. In total, I generated 32614 cards with 4166 characters and 18385 words. They are divided into separate files, each with about 100 cards in it. You can ...

These are the standard measure words for 问题: Normally you would use 个. If there is a stream of questions you can use 串, for example 一大串问题. If there are a couple of questions, you can use 些 If you are talking about kinds of questions, you have to use 类, for example 这类问题 (this kind of problem) 件 is used, but not very often, even in writing. 项 is not a ...

At the beginning, I recommend you read the articles on Wikipedia to get some background info, because my English level limits me to elaborate on these info. 诗 Shi; 词 Ci; 曲 Qu (here it refers to 歌 in the question); 赋 Fu; I am quite not familiar with the poetry in English or some other languages. Here I would only like to explain how I think ...

The best place to start is with the Wikipedia entry on stroke order. It lists these guidelines, along with more detail and some nice animated examples: Write from top to bottom, and left to right. Horizontal before vertical Diagonals right-to-left before diagonals left-to-right Center before outside in vertically symmetrical characters ...

In restaurants (茶餐廳) in Hong Kong, the "waiters" also face this problem because writing in a formal and clear way takes too much time. They developed methods so that they can take orders faster: Write words with other words that has the same pronunciation. For example, instead of writing the word 「飯」(faan6), they would write 「反」(faan2) because they both ...

Generally,there are two types of characters. "Compound character 合体" and "Single component Character 独体". And there are four Character building method "pictogram 象形","ideogram 指事"、"indicatives 会意","phono-semantic 形声". "Single component Character 独体" characters are derive from "pictogram 象形" and "ideogram 指事". e.g: pictogram: "人" means people "山" ...

Let me answer the most general question first: "even if the different languages are not mutually understandable when spoken, they are when written." To a large extent, this is true - but for two different reasons. Before the modern era, this is true because "written Chinese" was based on classical Chinese; whereas the spoken languages were highly divergent ...

Yes, "亲爱的" does indeed has a slightly different connotation to the English "Dear". It is not used as liberally in Chinese letters and emails. "亲爱的" expresses a closer relationship than "Dear" does. The following are situations where you may or may not use it: When is it definitely OK: you writing to your spouse you writing to your lover you writing to your ...

I had heard various numbers over the years, so I guessed at 4000 and generated computer flashcards for reading and writing all the Chinese vocabulary I'll need for the foreseeable future. There are currently 32614 cards with 4166 characters and 18385 words. They are divided into separate files, each with about 100 cards in it. You can download the flashcards ...

How long have you been practicing? At first it's normal. If you could see my first drawn characters... they didn't look good. But there are some simple rules to keep in mind to improve them. Stroke Order: It's unavoidable. You can actually use any stroke order you want, no-one is really going to check (unless that's the exam) but it's certain that writing ...

Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe all Cantonese characters (theoretically) have pinyin representations. Examples: 冇 (have not) / Yale: mou5 / Pinyin: mao3 佢哋 (they) / Yale: keui5 dei6 / Pinyin: qu2 di4 咗 (similar to 了) / Yale: jo2 / Pinyin: zuo3 嘢 (thing) / Yale: ye5 / Pinyin: ye3 But in my experience, using a Standard Chinese Pinyin IME to enter ...

I have been able to purchase in China books that have different styles of handwriting including shortcuts. They also have a layer of thin paper over the top of each page so you can trace. You can also look for books that show common characters written in different styles from print, traditional to script etc. This is not something you will be taught unless ...

福 [fú] character means "fortune" or "good luck". Posting the "福" character is a tradition for Chinese people during 春节 [chūn-jié] Spring Festival each year. The "福" character is often posted upside-down. It is said that this is because the character for "upside-down", "倒" [dào], is a homonym of the character for "to arrive", "到" [dào]. So this means that ...

The correct measure word or (量词) for 问题 is 个 as in 一个问题. There is no explanation for this, and the knowledge is only acquired through practice. 项 is a measure word for 工程 件 is a measure word for 事情 Other measure words include: 一尊佛像 (a statue, unit word describes a statue) 一顶帽子 (a hat) 一只猫 (a cat) 一打鸡蛋 (a dozen of eggs) 一条蛇 (a snake) 一串葡萄 (a bunch of ...

It all depends on the formality of the letter or email, the age of person being addressed, his/her relationship to you and how familiar you are with the said person. This is not something that you can define or quantify - you just have to get a feel for it. Anyway, for letters, the standard valediction goes something like this: 此致 敬礼! Note the double ...

The preferred phonetic input method (like pinyin) for Cantonese is Jyutping (粤拼/jyut6ping3/yue4pin1 in Mandarin). In GNU/Linux, both SCIM and (the now preferred?) IBus have packages available that add Jyutping support. They are available for Debian, but might be hard to find for other systems. At least I have only found .deb and .rpm for ibus-jyutping, ...

If you don't want to install a Cantonese IME, the Cantonese specific characters are included in cangjie (倉頡), using the same stroke decomposing rules. Here are some examples: 冇 = 大月 哋 = 口土心木 睇 = 月山金弓竹 Another useful resource is http://www.cantoneseinput.com/

You can use the Tablet PC Input Panel (whether you are on a tablet pc or not) by right clicking the taskbar, hovering over the toolbars submenu and checking tablet pc input panel If that option isnt available, you may need to install it by going to Control Panel -> Programs and Features -> Turn windows features on or off and checking tablet pc components ...

It depends on the OS you're in. On answers.microsoft.com I searched chinese and you can see the solutions for each OS from Microsoft. Just for completeness, let me add also a quick guide for the Mac OS X. You do the following: Go to System Preferences (you can reach it in the menu by clicking on the apple symbol on the top-left side); Click on "Language ...

I don't think that you are taught to write "cursive" in Chinese, most of it is something people just adapt naturally. You just need a really good grasp of characters to understand it. Sometimes people write fast and tend to simplify parts. There is no standard mold for cursive like in english. But what you can do is read a lot of handwritten documents, just ...

For me, I found learning the meaning of all (or at least most) radicals (the parts that make up each character) the crux of it all. Once I learned the meaning and could recognise the parts it made it a lot easier to remember them long term. For example, all metals seem to have the 金字旁, and every time I see a character that has this, e.g. 钢，铁等等, I can ...

Based on my experience, about 2000 characters will give you command of most texts. Perhaps 4,000 will make you fluent. For the first 2,000, I recommend, http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Characters-Learn-Remember-Meanings/dp/0982232403.

To memorize characters and pronunciation you can use Memrise, which will help you to learn by repeating words you've missed during the previous learning session. However, you won't learn any grammar or usage, just words. So it is not a complete solution, but a good help to expand your vocabulary. It is not as feature complete as Codeacademy but I don't ...

In university I had to write quite a few essays in Chinese, they follow the same basic structure of introduction, point 1, point 2, point... conculusion. I have also spent time correcting thesis and academic writing and it's pretty much identical to in the West. One point about learning to write better in Chinese that my wife taught me; don't get hung up ...

There is a great system that has been created to do Cantonese Romanization to Traditional or Simplified Characters input, it is a program called NJ Star Chinese Word Processor. You can change the language to Cantonese Romanization and the output to either Traditional or Simplified and then write in the romanization and it will give you character options to ...

I rely heavily on SRS. My method is to mainly use Recognition cards (ie the front has the character & the back has the pronunciation & meaning). If I notice a certain character is repeatedly causing me difficulty, I will add more example sentences that include that character. Pleco dictionary & the website nciku.com are helpful sources for this. ...

I would suggest taking a look at skritter.com. You can directly check out their demo on their site. Skritter is a website helping you to learn and memorize Chinese and Japanese characters. It uses the spaced repetition algorithm to get your Character retention to about 90%. Skritter basically shows you the pinyin and asks you to write the character stoke ...

Make up stories / mnemonic devices and memorize them. Review them periodically and write the characters based on the elements in the stories. For example (聘): Story: @hire@ the archer who draws his BOW (弓) back to his EAR (耳) and hits the X-MARKED SPOT (由). If I follow the story and recognize the capitalized words, I'll write an ear on the left, an ...