Chinese Flashcards

In the last few weeks, we have stepped up our efforts to learn Chinese in a more systematic way. It all began in late November, sitting outside Corner Bakery at the Galleria, when B pulled out a small stack of flashcards from a set that we had owned for many years but only dabbled in here and there...



But, as we sat there and tried to learn how to recognize and how to write about 10 characters - ones which were of medium difficulty - we began the journey of slowly trying to get through all of the cards in this set.

Now, about 45 days later, we can probably recognize about 200 of the characters maybe 95% of the time, are hit-and-miss for about 50 characters, and still have another 200 that we haven't even touched. But... we're getting there!

It builds our confidence when we see something in Chinese - on a sign, or in a book, or on a webpage - and now we can recognize a handful of the characters in each sentence. Just character recognition, mind you... full sentence comprehension is still far out of our grasp.

Nonetheless, I highly recommend Tuttle's flashcard set over another set that we own, published by Vis-Ed. And this is only Volume 1 out of 4 sets. The print on the Vis-Ed set is too small, when what you really want to see is the single Chinese character in huge, easy-to-distinguish strokes. This is helpful both for recognition and for writing. And on top of that, Tuttle's examples of character usage seem more useful and typical.