Some tips about starting to learn Chinese

I keep thinking about a few tips that might help anyone starting Chinese at FSI soon, and I'd like to share.

1) Start learning the characters right away. You will start by learning pinyin and the sound of the words in the book. You will be overwhelmed learning the pronunciation, vocabulary, and everything else. The teachers will tell you you don't need to learn them yet. They won't introduce characters until about a week into class. You might think you only need to learn the characters from the Reading book at first. NOT TRUE. From the moment you open that Integrated Chinese book and see that vocabulary list, learn the characters as well, because two weeks later you will realize you need to know them and you don't.

(A certain blogger/former Chinese student  told me this (go down to the paragraph that reads "DO *****NOT NOT NOT***** LISTEN WHEN APOLOGETIC TEACHERS TRY TO TELL YOU THAT THERE'S NO NEED TO MEMORIZE THE READING OR SPINE VOCABULARY IMMEDIATELY. ..). I remembered it. But I was so overwhelmed that I didn't listen. Don't be stupid like me.)

2) No one is going to teach you HOW to learn the characters. When I first started, I thought someone was going to hold my hand and literally teach me each one. Nope. No time for that. You have to do the work yourself. You'll start with numbers, and quickly move on to words. Look at each one. Find some way to make it stick in your brain that, for example, 我 (Wǒ) means I (I looked for the upside down w).

At first, you may use broad shapes of characters to memorize them- like this character has this funny thing on this right side. At some point, you'll see more characters with that funny thing and realize you're in trouble. But by then, your mind may be somewhat more open to this exercise and you'll find you can absorb more. At least that's what happened to me.

Some people choose to write the characters over and over again to memorize them. But since we don't have to write for the test, and we learn 50-150 characters in a week, I didn't feel like I had the time to do that. You might- you'll have to figure out your own method. I used Pleco flashcards heavily in the beginning, but as the characters kept piling up, I couldn't keep up. I still rely on Pleco heavily to look words and characters up.

Nowadays I use Quizlet in the lab to learn the characters- they have some fun games and tests that help with the monotony of learning so many words.

3) I don't know if this is common or not, but I realized about 2 months into class that I was totally wasting time I could have been using to learn characters. How? When my teachers use powerpoint presentations (3-5 hours of the day), they usually write the characters, the pinyin, and the English. Without even realizing it, my brain and eyes were ignoring the characters and going straight to the pinyin. I have had to train my eyes to linger on the characters, to read the characters first rather than the pinyin- basically to not squander this extra time I have to learn the characters. I was really surprised when I realized what I was doing.

Those are my thoughts for now. Hope they are helpful to someone else out there.