Found a cheap trick for learning Chinese characters that clicked for me

I kept mixing up similar looking characters like 大 and 太... it was driving me nuts after about 3 months of studying. Then a guy at a Shanghai noodle shop told me to just focus on the tiny differences by drawing them side by side on sticky notes with a red pen. Putting them up on my bathroom mirror did the trick in just a week. Anyone else have a random hack like that stick with them?

2 comments

2 Comments

hunt.leo1mo ago

Wait is this post for real or am I missing something? Mixing up 大 and 太 after three months is not that big of a deal since they literally have one extra line. I mean yeah having a system to study is fine but acting like this was some kind of crisis before you met a noodle shop guru seems a bit dramatic. Most people just use Anki or write characters in a notebook a few times and move on with their lives. Sticky notes on a mirror does work for some stuff but you could have solved this in like ten minutes by just paying attention. Are people really getting that twisted over one little dot?

barbarab561mo ago

You said "one little dot" like it's nothing, but for someone just starting out, that dot is the difference between "big" and "too much" in a language where context is everything. Have you actually tried explaining that difference to a beginner who's still struggling with stroke order? It sounds like you've been doing this long enough that it's muscle memory, but three months in, your brain is still fighting to remember which squiggles mean what. I'm curious, what was the one character that really tripped you up when you were starting out, or did you just breeze through it all?