Yay, I made it! I started learning how to read Chinese characters 2.5 years ago, and three flash card apps, 1286 flash cards, hundreds of articles, and two visits to China later, I can now recognize 2300 ± 400 characters, enough to read while consulting a dictionary occasionally. Most of the stuff below is Mandarin-specific, although some are useful for other languages that use Chinese characters such as Cantonese and Japanese, or for language learning in general.

  • It’s like Wikipedia, but a dictionary. The UI is a bit cluttered with information about stuff like old Chinese reconstructed pronunciations which you can ignore.
  • Fcitx 5 is a nice IME with pinyin support and now has an Android port that didn’t exist when I started out.
  • It’s very annoying to search for a character if you can’t copy and paste it, such as if it’s in an image, and I would rather not go through the pain of learning a shape-based input method such as Cangjie or Wubi. Fortunately, Fcitx 5 has a handy feature where you instead can type the pinyin of the various components of a character if it’s decomposable.
  • If you’re really stuck, this site lets you input Chinese characters by drawing.
  • A nice greppable list of character frequencies to help you judge if making a flash card for a character will be useful or not.
  • Test how many characters you know.
  • A browser extension that shows the definition of any word you hover over.

For a long time, I felt like I absolutely sucked at reading Chinese, constantly checking the dictionary, getting bored, getting distracted, failing. But over time, somehow the convoluted lines and curves melted away into splashes of meaning, but it’s not like it all clicked at some moment. It felt locally constant, but now 2.5 years later, the progress is a lot more obvious! I didn’t even practice my flash cards or reading all that often since I’m pretty busy with other stuff, but over time, magic happens.

I think the most important thing to successfully learn a language is that it should be fun. Yeah yeah that sounds cliche, but seriously, it’s a great way to motivate yourself. The best thing is that learning a language is very broad and you can read or watch pretty much anything and use the excuse that it’ll be useful if it’s near your skill level. For instance, here are some things I read: