Mnemonic

If you like to learn Chinese I do really recommend you to learn these characters, too.
(I recommend to learn Traditional Characters rather than Simplified Character, view my last post...)
They might be difficult to learn with the classical method of learning (writing them down several times). But if you also learn the characters’ components (which are IN the character) and make mnemonic rhymes (or other mnemonic helps) learning Chinese characters will be very easy.

An Example:

唱 (chang4 – sing; chant) consists of
口 (kou3 – mouth) and
2x 日 (ri4 – sun).
(*Chinese is a tonal language. ‘3’ stands for third tone (ˇ); ‘4’ stands for fourth tone (ˋ) )

First let’s learn 口:
That is really easy because it actually looks like a widely open mouth.

Let’s learn 日:
If you draw a sun you certainly first draw a circle (ㅇ) surrounded by many strokes.
But note that there are no round-shaped character so we take 口 instead.
But drawing so many surrounding strokes is also quite annoying so just abbreviate it with only one stroke (一) and put it in the middle (日) to represent all strokes. So it's 日 ri4 sun

Now let’s learn 唱:
Reinterpret 日 as ‘closed mouth’.
sing; chant = 1 open mouth (口) + 2 “closed mouths” (日=sun)
mnemonic rhyme:
Three persons are SINGing. One of them has his solo (open MOUTH [口]). The other two are waiting (upper and lower lip are together; closed mouths [日=SUN]).

It's easy, isn't it? ^^

So why is it useful to learn not only the character itself, but also its components?
Does it not mean that you have to learn more? (character AND its components)?
- In the beginning one has to learn more, that's right, but there are only about 500 possible character components, but more than 5000 characters.
So at the beginning you learn more and at the end you have less problems to remember the characters - therefore it's worth to learn all character components!!!

And of course, mnemonic advices are only possible when one knows the components of a character!