Why Should You Start by Learning Characters?

Some learners may wonder where they should start. Some of them begin with words. This is because they can estimate their vocabulary capacity using words in English. However, in Chinese, there are even more basic and fundamental units - characters (字).

I know that Chinese students always learn their native language in order of '字 - 词 - 句 - 文章' (characters - words - sentences - articles). For each character that you have learnt, you need to be able to read and write it, and then use it in a word, sentence and article. Words that are comprised of several characters often combine the meanings of those characters. Therefore, you should start with characters.

I will give you an example.

Character - 喜 -happy

Word - 喜欢 - like

Sentence - 我喜欢学中文 I like to learn Chinese.