Rachel Farmer

Studying Chinese Characters

 

This year in Chinese I have grown in being able to memorize things easier, in the aspect of Chinese I am able to memorize characters a lot better than I could first quarter of the year by coming up with better studying techniques.  One of these studying techniques was to write down the characters pinyin and English meaning and correlate them to which one they meant.  After doing this I would study the list for a little bit and then I would fold over the paper so I could only see the characters and I would first match the English meaning to the character and then I would go over the pinyin for each one then I would match the pinyin to the English.  I would do this several times to make sure that I know the material.  I would also practice writing the characters multiple times so I would know how to write them for quizzes and I would also be able to recognize them when reading something for class.  Before using this studying technique I would just look at the characters and the English meanings and the pinyin but I wouldn’t match the pinyin to the English, I would only match the pinyin and the English to the character.

 

One thing that prompted me to study better was the quizzes that we took.  At the beginning of the year I realized that when I would take the quiz I would not be able to remember the character completely because I did not practice writing it.  After multiple quizzes that I received a low mark I started to study differently.  After using my new technique, I scored around an 84% and decided that I need to spend more time studying.  After taking more time to study, I scored a 97%.  An artifact I would use for this specific learning endeavor would be my quizzes.  I would use one of my past quizzes and one of my more recent ones to show my progress due to my studying.  This artifact would show how my studying has helped to improve my scores on my quizzes.  Another artifact I would use is one of the papers I have used to study for one of my quizzes.  This artifact would display how I study and how it has helped me to improve my scores on quizzes.  Overall I think that learning to study Chinese better has contributed to me being able to study better in multiple other classes as well.