Among so many ways of memorizing Chinese characters, memorize by flashing is a very challenging way to test students’ memory. It is also a very common way to learn Chinese in China because it requires students remember the words in a very shortly limited time.
After the teacher flash a new word before the student for one second, or shorter, student should able to write it down immediately. It is a frequently utilized method to learn Mandarin. What’s more, when the students see the character, they should read the parts. For example, when the character “念” is showed, the two parts “今” and “心” should be read out.
For those people who attend Mandarin language courses in China, the teacher will pay much attention to the “parts-teaching” at the beginning of Chinese teaching. It is a method with high efficiency in the primary learning phase because by this way the students are very concentrating and their brains are very active to learn Chinese language.
Most Chinese characters are composed of several strokes. According to this characteristic, we can study Chinese by adding a stroke to turn one word to another. By this way, the students can make the differences of some similar words in structure.
The teacher can write some words on the blackboard, asking students to read them and add one stroke to form another word. The following words are usually chosen for practicing when you attend to school to study Mandarin: 王、头、亚、从、尤、几、牛、古、火、叶、休、天、白、名、日. After thinking, the possible answers may be the following ones: 玉、主；买；严；丛；龙；凡；生；舌；灭；吐；体；夫、矢；百；各；白、甲、由、申、电、田、旧、旦.
The constructions of some Chinese characters are very interesting so that we can add two dots to turn them into different words. It must be very attractive to practice by this way when you study in China. Here are some words of this type: 力、未、令、天、干、人、中、兄、口、开. Now you can try word-formation in order as followed: 办、为；来；冷；关；平；火；冲；况、兑；只；并.
As Chinese characters are made of various strokes, we can take this advance to train students’ sensibility to the wrongly written characters. The teacher can teach Mandarin language by copying a very short story on the blackboard, among which many characters are missing a stroke. And the students are supposed to find out and correct them.
Most relevantly complicated Chinese characters consist of phonetic indicators. Therefore, in most Mandarin learning courses, the teacher often take advantage of them to practice forming words to deepen the understanding of the constructions Chinese characters.
The teacher can separate the whole class into two teams. One is responsible for words formation and another to recognize them. Let’s take a look how Chinese language school do to practice by this means. Before beginning, the teacher prepares 20 frequently- used phonetic indicators for Team A and give two minutes to prepare for combing the two parts into complete characters. One point will marked if one character formed correctly, one point lose if wrongly formed. The team got the highest scores will win.
For those who study Chinese should improve their speed of recognizing and memorizing characters as well as capability of positioning the components correctly. Teacher can find some productive components, writing them on the blackboards with the order of Chinese characters. The students are supposed to filling the blank to form new words.
For example, firstly, a blank could be drew on the blackboard, and the components “木”,“木”,“扌” and“十” will be positioned respectively on the top, bottom, left and right of the blank. So we can add “口” to form new words with the parts around it. Of course, only three or two sides is also available. To learn Mandarin further, you can also write down Pinyin of the formed words.
For the reason that Chinese characters are made of some strokes, it is very interesting to when learning Chinese. All methods above are very practical and efficient and can provoke students’ interest to learn Chinese characters.