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Four Methods to Learn and Remember Chinese Words

For most overseas students who learn Chinese in China, vocabulary is a key factor to learn Chinese language better, as well as a difficult point for them. Therefore, teacher should take the responsibility to help them increase their vocabulary.

In our daily talk, to express clearly what we want to say, we often need some adjective phrases, verb phrases, prepositional phrases, etc. So for those who learn Mandarin Chinese, we can practice them by asking a series of questions in different aspects to a certain thing.

Firstly, the teacher chooses one thing in the mind that students do not know. Students should raise questions to the teacher, trying to find out what the “thing” is. To practice more techniques of asking questions when they learn Chinese, the teacher can only answer with “是” or “不是”.

Let’s take one example to explain more detailed to the learners who study Chinese. If what teacher chooses is “黑板”, then students will ask a series of questions to find the answer like “它是有生命的吗?”, “它有脚吗?”, “它在我们的桌子上吗?” and so on. By this way, they narrow the field and close to the target gradually and finally find the answer.

If Chinese language learners want to enlarge their vocabulary, they should deepen their understanding about Chinese word-formation and improve their ability of building words. When they learn Mandarin, teacher can separate some learned disyllables and polysyllables and disorder them. Then students will match them according to the formation rules

For this game, teacher can ask students to practice on the blackboard or in the exercise books. For the purpose of training those students study in China, teacher should practice it in advance to ensure the accuracy. What’s more, teacher should realize that some characters can form more than one word when they are matched with the others.

Because of the high capability of word formation of Chinese characters, many learned characters can form many new words. So it can enrich students’ knowledge and increase their vocabulary.

There are many homophonic words in Chinese language. So we can take this advantage to help students learn more words when they study Mandarin Chinese. If they can master the skill of replacing words with the ones have similar pronunciation, they will have more rapid reaction and better associative ability to remember more words.

Let’s take examples to describe in detail to show learners how it goes in Chinese learning programs. Teacher first says one character or word, students are supposed to think out a new word begin with the given one. But the word should have similar pronunciation with the former one and the tone can be different, but it can’t be the same character. For instance, 图书馆——馆,管理——理,里头——头,偷东西——西,希望——望,忘记——记,计算——算,算数——数,树木——木,母亲——亲,勤快——快,筷子——子,自己——己,几毛钱……

By this way, they can associate the different words of similar pronunciation together, thus increasing their vocabulary. During the process, teacher should give them hints if they can’t move on. And discussion is allowed. If necessary, teacher should write them down on the blackboard.

As a variation of the method just mentioned, building word chain is also a good way to help students remember Chinese words, which is often applied to the one-on-one Chinese learning programs. This may be a little more difficult for learners because it requires a large quantity of words.

The teacher begins the game by writing down one word on the blackboard and students should start another word begin with the last character of the former word one by one. If some Chinese language learners often learn Chinese online free, they may ever saw the word chain like this: 中→中国→国力→力气→气量→量力而行→行军→军事→事业→业务→务必→必需→需要……

To encourage students learn Chinese language, teacher can make it as a competition by dividing students into groups. It is beneficial for students to remember and learn words by this way. They can build one word chain to remember a group of words they can’t remember firmly.

As a foundation of learning Chinese language better, words should be learned as many as possible. Those methods mentioned above might be great help for them.

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