How To Master Any Chinese Character In Seconds

I would like you to close your eyes if you can if it's safe to do so and imagine that you are standing outside your home have a look around and try and remember recall as many details as you possibly can maybe even touch the wall or the floor or a car anything that's nearby you to try and interact a little bit with the environment now I want you to imagine that Neo from The Matrix is standing next to you and next to Neo is famous actor Gary Oldman don't worry there's a reason for all this Gary Oldman pulls out a giant syringe in fact this syringe is so big it's about the same size as him and the syringe is filled with this bright green liquid Mr Oldman then takes the syringe and shoves it into the ground so it stands up all by itself so from your perspective you have Neo on the left Gary Oldman in the middle and the syringe on the right then suddenly you see Neo get a look of determination in his face and he jumps in the air lands on Gary Oldman jumps off Gary oldman's head and lands on the syringe injecting this green liquid into the ground when the green liquid goes into the ground you feel the whole ground begin to shake and Rumble and then you look down and you realize that the Earth is changing into desert so what was asphalt road dirt whatever it was before has now become sand and you see cacti popping up everywhere then you look over at Neo and Gary Oldman and they look very thirsty and hot and they drop to their knees grabbing their throats gasping for a glass of water so you just learned how to read write and pronounce with the correct tone a Chinese character believe it or not and I'll explain how as we get further into this video if you want to become fluent in Chinese the best way to do that is to get lots and lots of comprehensible input now the best way to make input comprehensible in Chinese is to learn Chinese characters now to reach a very high level of Chinese you will need around 3 000 characters and the big problem for Chinese Learners is that the methods out there for learning characters are either really boring really ineffective or both but in this video I'm going to teach you an amazing technique using memory palaces that will allow you to learn any Chinese character in under 60 seconds many of the members of our course the Mandarin blueprint method are using this technique to learn 30 40 50 even 100 characters every single day and the best part is literally anyone can do this method I know some of you might have heard the words memory palaces and got a little bit intimidated don't worry you don't need to be super imaginative or creative you just need to follow the instruction I'm going to lay out for you in just a moment so first some backstory on this I was struggling big time with Chinese like most people do right for my first year I made almost zero progress despite investing at least a thousand hours into all sorts of traditional methods but I finally at one point woke up to the idea that I need to get comprehensible input I knew I needed to learn how to read first because that's the most comprehensible form of input it's a bit easier than listening so I decided to Learn 3 000 characters as quickly as possible Google told me that the most effective method was something called remembering the simplified hands of by heisigan Richardson now the heisig method as it's known in the Chinese Learning Community is pretty cool like there's some good parts about the method but there's also some pretty massive flaws that I noticed after learning about 50 or so characters so the method is powered by visualization mnemonic visualization so imagining things in your head that represent elements of the character to help you remember the character so components or Primitives as Heiser calls it are represented by objects or even people or animals that have some sort of connection to that object based on the appearance or the meaning then the method gives you a story for each character that involve these objects and you have to imagine them in different scenarios that represent the keyword in some way it works don't get me wrong it's the second best method out there but one of the big flaws is first of all it doesn't teach you pronunciation at all just teaches you how to remember the look of the character pronunciation is a huge part of the language and connecting reading with listening is absolutely vital for like efficient comprehension so if you just learn the characters not the pronunciation you have to just go back at the beginning and fill in the blanks somehow and heisig doesn't really help with that another gripe I have with this method is that it only gives you one story and doesn't really teach you that well how to create your own stories so you're kind of a lot of the time stuck with heisig and Richardson's stories their suggestions which aren't that great sometimes and if one story doesn't gel with you well you're just kind of out of luck but the genius part about this method is the order of the characters he groups the characters by component so you'll learn a component or a primitive and you'll think of an object to represent that then you'll learn a bunch of characters that are relatively common that will use that particular component the idea is absolutely brilliant and we actually used it as inspiration to create our own order of characters for the Mandarin blueprint method so after my disappointment with the heising method I decided to do a bit more research and see if I could think of a way to enhance the method Myself by adding elements that would also allow me to memorize the pronunciation of the characters as well as the characters themselves and in my search I stumbled upon this Ted Talk by a guy called Josh to a four I think that's how you pronounce it he's a journalist who investigated memory athletes those guys that can memorize thousands of digits of pi or decks and decks of cards in like seconds and then regurgitate them perfectly Joshua decided to learn the technique himself which he did and in the space of one year Joshua mastered these techniques and actually won a memory Championship pretty amazing right it's very inspiring to know that it's just a technique that anyone can learn and no matter what they're learning these memory Champions whether it's digits of pie decks of cards lines from a sonnet or a speech they all have the same thing in common all these different techniques which is people objects places and actions so they'll map out different elements of what they want to learn to these people objects places in actions so for example for playing cards the Queen of Diamonds might be your auntie who represents a queen and then the diamond might be represented by a location that you know well at your local store so if one of these memory athletes wanted to memorize the queen of diamonds for example very very quickly they just quickly imagine their auntie in their local store and then they go on to the next card at this point I started getting very excited I was considering creating my own method from scratch that would use the heisig method and enhance it and map it out to the pinion chart so I could learn the pronunciation of these cards as well and the tone as I was about to get started on this I realized that someone already beat me to it way back in 2012. this guy called Serge garudish who created a blog post about something called the Marilyn method and what he had done is mapped out people and places to the pinion chart to represent the opinion initials and finals and he'd used locations within those places that he knew to represent the tones and I actually used this method the Mariner method to Learn 3 000 characters in six months and remember everything easily with just about 30 or 45 minutes a day and that includes reviewing time in fact Mandarin blueprint co-founder Phil crimmins and myself both got to 3 000 characters around the same time learned to read and started getting lots of comprehensible input and we both went from really struggling and not really making any progress and being essentially beginners to passing the hsk 6 in around six months so this method for learning characters combined with all the other cool stuff we've been learning about teaching people what we knew and at the same time developing our own curriculum for mastering Chinese faster we further enhanced the Marilyn method and added some different techniques and different aspects as well as lots of memory athletic techniques based on our research to it to make it even more efficient and effective and we ended up creating a new version of the Mariner method that we call the hanza movie method so without further Ado let's get into it so the first thing you need to know about this method is what is mapped to what right there's lots of things we need to know about a Chinese character to fully Master it we need to know the opinion initial the pinion final the tone and we need to know the components within the character but not only that we need to know and memorize the position of the components within the character and of course we also need to know the meaning of the character now many characters have multiple meanings but don't worry we just choose the most common meaning and learn that first and you can build upon the other pronunciations and meanings by getting comprehensible input later on so remember we've got four different things people objects places and actions that we're going to associate with different elements of Chinese characters let's start with people we like to call them actors remember the movie method we're making movies here in our mind that's how we like to see it so the people that we choose are actors so people are going to be representing the pinion initials within the opinion chart objects in this method are going to represent the character components we like to call them props and the third category of places are going to be buildings from your life could be your home could be your workplace could be your local library or gym literally any building you like those are going to represent pinion finals and we like to call those sets actors props sets and then finally we have actions which is where it all comes together you're going to have your actor interact with props within your set and that's going to represent the keyword or the definition of the character now the creator of the Marilyn method did something very smart with the pinion chart in order for this method to work really really well now in the standard pinion chart there are only 21 initials so 21 people that we'd have to imagine but 38 finals it's much easier to imagine people from your life than it is to imagine actual places what this guy did though was tweak the pinion chart so there are less finals and more initials so this is the changes that have been made to the pinion chart check this out if you look at the very top of the pinion chart you'll see that we actually have 38 finals in total but if you look closer you'll see that we actually really only have 13 and they are the finals associated with a E and O and then for i u and U essentially these 13 finals are just duplicated but with the I or the U or the U in front of them so for example we have Al as a final but then we just have iow or it's just e with r next to it right we also have a but then we have just way way right so that that whole final is just a but with a o in front of it as a final example we have the E final but we also have uh right that's just that's just the E final but with you in front of it so what this guy did was just keep those first 13 finals at a out and uh then he replaced the I the U and the U finals with a bunch of initials instead so what we're left with is 13 finals and four different categories of initial now what this did was it took away the final for all of these new initials so they have nowhere to be but for this method to work for this people objects places actions technique to work you must have a person and a place now this guy called it the null final what is null well it's just the symbol that you see in the pinion chart that represents nothing so we just created this extra null final set or location or building so all these new initials have a place to act out their movie scenes when you're learning a character with their pronunciation so this section of the opinion chart here is the biggest and it involves those original 13 finals now you'll also notice that R over here has a null final too and the reason why R has a null vinyl is because it's just kind of a wild card anyway even in normal pinion so you don't want to have to basically imagine an entirely new set or building from your life or create an entire Memory Palace just to this one relatively rare pronunciation so also given that the null final too if this atoll is starting to sound convoluted or confusing right now do not worry you will completely get this method after between 5 and 10 characters once you see some examples it'll all be very very clear so before we get into those examples let me just go through the four different categories of actor that we've now got so in this section all of the initials you see here on the left are going to be represented by male people right that could be real or fictional so an F would be some male connected to the letter F so this could be Frank Sinatra it could be Henry Ford or even could be Phil Collins right so yeah it's not the same spelling but it sounds like right just anything connected with that is fine just helps you remember it and if you were learning a character with the pronunciation Fung f-a-n-g well you would imagine say Phil Collins In Your Ang location whatever building from your life you decided to attach to Ang and we'll get into how to do that very shortly one quick thing about this group of male actors though is you'll notice at the very top left you'll see the null symbol again if you look at the finals on this line technically in pinyin they all of these finals do not have an initial any character with this pronunciation technically doesn't have an initial and these are the only 13 pronunciations in the entire language without an initial but we need to have people and places and objects and actions for this system to work so we've also given this a null actor now this could be anyone but we like to suggest someone incredibly famous very well known to you so for me I like Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan like just because they're like globally famous and also I know them very very well but you go ahead and choose whoever it does it really doesn't matter the second category are females EBP me Etc these are all female actors so these could of course be real or fictional again and this third category here Etc they will all be animated so you can attach any animated character and imagine them in your mind's eye so when you want to learn a character for example for you might imagine Bugs Bunny if you want to learn a character with the pronunciation then you would imagine Shrek or someone else connected to sh and they would of course be in the null set and finally we have this fourth category here and the original Creator gave this the category of gods just to make sure that they were distinct from the other three categories and we started off doing that too but over hundreds of hours of teaching this to people we've got so many cool ideas for people that couldn't imagine Gods very easily because there's not that many right and you might not know much about Greek mythology or Roman mythology and to be honest I'm not really an expert on that either and I always found that quite difficult even though there's only six people to imagine so over the years we've had so many people come back with with ideas for like oh I want to imagine rock bands or people in this category are only actors or characters from Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings right another student who imagined communist leaders for this particular one so he imagined like Stalin uh Mao you know so what we've now labeled this as is a wild card so go ahead and choose gods or rock stars or Harry Potter characters whatever you want for this particular one it's only six people you have to imagine anyway so one question you might have is that why are we imagining four different groups of people well it's simply for ease of access to the method because you can now look at a pronunciation and listen to how it sounds if it sounds like this e then it's going to be a female doing something if it sounds like this or there's going to be an animated character like uh for example it's like dual plus a which is going to be a fictional actor if it sounds like you you it's got that sound in it it's gonna be that fourth world card category and by the way if you want to swap the men and the women around please go ahead and do that I just personally stuck with the men first then the women because generally I find men easier to imagine but you might have more females that you can imagine easier so go ahead and switch those around it really doesn't matter so the idea is you choose all of these 55 actors and then you move on and choose all the sets now as for sets what you can do is just write down all the buildings from your life that you know well so you need at least 13 right but you can write down as many as you can now these buildings you don't have to know every single brick you don't have to know the color of the curtains you just have to know roughly what it looks like inside and the best sets are sets that you have a lot of episodic memory inside of so your childhood home for example is your for most people the most powerful set because that has the most episodic memory episodic memory is just basically memory from different episodes of your life and it's packed with emotion and emotion is the key that makes this method work really really well but it doesn't have to be super emotional just imagine like if you if you know a store that you go into like every every week or a couple of times a week just you can just pick that all these different houses you've lived in friends houses families houses workplaces that you've stayed in maybe not work places because you'll be spending a lot of time in them maybe you spend enough time in them as it is but you could also Imagine your local gym just write out a bunch of buildings that you know and then you can just attach the spellings to them so I've just decided my gym is my a place and because there's only 13 places you can pretty much memorize this by rote but in our course we like to go the extra mile so what we've done is laid out some mnemonics you can use to actually connect to your sets quicker so for example there's a bunch of words with a N in them so you just go through this list of a n words and as soon as you have a connection with any of the locations that you wrote down that is now your an place and just do that with all the 13 sets what this does it just gets the memory of that place that spelling connected with the location cemented in your brain faster so once you've got your 55 actors in your 13 sets you don't have to choose all of them them at the beginning you can just choose them as you go through the order of characters that you're using we've found over the years of doing this that half of our members prefer choosing their actors and sets first before starting and the other half tend to choose as they go so whichever you fancy now as for the objects and the actions well you've already had a taste of that with my example movie scene towards the beginning of this video so we had Neo with Gary Oldman outside the front of your home and they were doing something with a syringe right do you remember what happened I'm guessing you remember quite a bit of that scene if not everything about that scene the character you learned during that movie scene was Gan which means dry in Chinese maybe that gives you a clue as to why we imagined a desert right now this character could be split up in a couple of different ways but we split it up like this e at the top that means number one in Chinese this horizontal line and sure this cross which represents number 10 in Chinese so Neo represented number one because he is the one right and the syringe was representing the number 10 there the cross shape as you can see you can represent props by either the meaning or appearance of the component so as you can see when you're choosing props you can do it based on the component's appearance or the meaning it's completely up to you so for this e for example you could have imagined a cigar or you could have imagined something connected to the number 10 so for example a bowling pin you know 10 pin bowler or you might have imagined uh Maradona or Pele some sort of famous athlete with number 10 on their Jersey or you might even imagine the Prime Minister of England because number 10 Downing Street it really doesn't matter and the amazing thing about this method is that you're going to be choosing your own associations which makes it so much more powerful now you can also just go with mine that's absolutely fine and a lot of beginners of our method like to do that now as for the local education and the people you might have already kind of guessed that Gary Oldman was related to the pronunciation this character is pronounced Gan so that's G so that's Gary Oldman that's just someone that I find very memorable he's just one of my favorite actors so I chose him that place that building that you imagined is now your an set but the cool information here is where you were in that building what that means you see there's a reason why I asked you to imagine yourself outside the entrance of your home specifically not in the living room not in the bathroom outside the entrance Zone the driveway or something like that it's because Gan is a first tone and tones in this method are represented by where you are within the set so first tone is represented by outside the entrance second tone is represented by the hallway or the kitchen third tone is represented by a living room or one of the bedrooms and the fourth tone is represented by a backyard or one of the toilets now when it comes to imagining like a gym or a library you might not have a living room to imagine right but just choose something that's equivalent in your opinion you decide on where your boundaries are for your different tones within your sets now finally the most important part of this whole thing actions the script as we like to call it bring it all together making your actor interact with the props in that specific location to represent the keyword meaning or the definition of the character this is often where beginners stumble or get intimidated because it involves creativity to some degree but it's super simple if you allow it to be the key thing to remember here is just think of the definition that is where you're trying to get to as quickly as possible whilst you are interacting with all of the different elements in this scene at some point so for example I had Neo and the syringe and I had Gary Oldman and I had to think of a way of combining these things together to represent dry and the easiest way to do this is to just draw off of your own knowledge and experience about how the world works and then apply a bit of logic to it so for example what does a syringe do a syringe injects stuff now I didn't really want to inject people I didn't feel like doing that but I just decided to inject it into the ground and I don't know why I gave it green liquid to be honest just because I guess it stands out a bit so things are like bright and shiny they sort of stand out what does neo do well he can beat people up a lot and he can fly and he can jump and I've seen all the Matrix movies so I'm just like okay well he's going to jump on Gary Oldman what is Gary Oldman doing not much really I mean he's just there as long as he's interacting with something or being interacted with at some point then he's gonna be memorable to me so I just had him pick up the syringe put it in the ground and I had Neo jump on him and this was all leading to the finale which was make it into a desert make what I'm seeing here into a desert and that represents dry to me and then just to hammer it home I had Neo with Gary Oldman both sort of clutching their throats like give me a drink of water and that represents dry even more right just to make sure it's absolutely clear so the way I like to imagine this is imagine that you're doing this for the cheap seats way back in the cinema you have to make everything you're doing really obvious and clear to yourself so once you've got your actors in The set with the props ready to go you think about the keyword and you think what is my association with this keyword and funnily enough just go with your first Association they usually end up being the most effective so maybe when you think of dry you think of sandpaper or you think of a towel or you think of someone really thirsty or you think of a desert whatever your Association is just go okay let's see what how I can get to that Association as quickly as possible with the props that I have at hand the memory athletes the memory Champions the people that do this professionally that is what they spend their time practicing they don't do push-ups or pull-ups or running what they do is they try and sit there and they make their associations as fast and as simple as possible and that's all you need to do too a great hack for this is to bring your senses into play so not just your vision but also your hearing and also your touch those are probably the three top wines but you can also even imagine smell and taste as well another thing to remember about this is don't think you have to imagine these huge elaborate things like fairy dust explosions people flying or creating weird things that often don't even really exist or happen in your reality and just making them happen in your mind it's way too much effort and it's not even that effective funnily enough the most normal things just sticking a syringe in the ground right actually are more memorable than something Fantastical and the reason these are more effective is because your brain imagines them as real it sort of accepts these memories as it were whereas something really crazy and Fantastical not only is it really strenuous to create but also your brain is like oh that's not real that's not important therefore I won't remember it so let's now apply everything we've learned about how this method works and the principles that I've just taught you to learn this new character this character is called ban and it means half so we have the same set as we had for Gan meaning dry because it's the an final but this time we're not outside the front entrance it's Fourth tone so we're in either the toilets or the backyard or equivalent so go ahead and put yourself there right now I'm gonna go with the backyard for this example just because it's usually bigger more space to work with for a beginner but by the way don't worry if you have a small bathroom or something like that it's absolutely fine Phil used his method to learn 3000 characters and he had the smallest bathroom known to man in Chengdu it's like three foot by five I think and he still used it for learning hundreds of characters so take yourself there and I want you to choose a b actor now this is from this section of the pinion chart so it's going to be another male actor we're going to choose anyone associated with B I have a brother called Ben so I would probably go with him but if you don't want to imagine your family then you could just imagine like Brad Pitt or Ben Affleck or Brendan Fraser or any of the characters they've played in their movies right so remember you can have real or fictional I'm gonna go with Bob Marley personally but you go with whoever you want feel free to pause the video if you want to spend time but do not obsess over any of these choices okay just choose someone that's you can imagine what they look like you don't hate them right something you can imagine but you also like have either neutral or Pleasant feelings towards preferably because they're going to be living in here right so once you've chosen your actor go ahead and jump into the backyard of your an set and imagine that they are standing right there in front of you this character has three different components the first component is going to be at the top which is horns now of course you can imagine your actor wearing one of those Viking helmets or you can imagine a devil or a demon of some kind or you can do what I want to do which is I'm going to imagine Hellboy I watch a ton of movies so I just like I tend to make all of my axes even a lot of my props into characters from movies but the choice is completely yours so I'm gonna go with Hellboy for my horns now the other two props that we're going to go for are the same exact props we used in the first movie scene that we made so we've got the syringe and Neo now if you want to choose your own props if you want to go with a cigar or a razor blade for the number one instead go ahead if you want to choose a crucifix or a bowling pin or Pele for your number 10 then go ahead and do that but you can just follow along with mine it's super easy to slightly tweak these scenes with different props and I'll show you how so I'm going to do based on my props and then I'll switch out a couple of the props and show you how easy it is to make the scene work even with completely different objects so the next step is keyword right so all we need to do is associate something visual with the definition of the character that we're trying to go for and then get there as quickly as possible with the ingredients that we have to work with so when I think of half that I just immediately think of something being cut in half there you go that's visual that does the job for me could be a piece of fruit getting cut in half but ideally you want to try and avoid bringing in extra objects that aren't the props into this unnecessarily try and just work with what you have so what objects or people could I cut in half I'm not going to cut people in half but violence and stuff you can use that if you want but I like to keep mine clean and you don't need to use extravagant violence or explosions or anything like that in these methods to make them work amazingly well in fact like I said before emotional content is actually more effective so it's better if you close your eyes and you're relaxed and you're in a nice quiet environment right but if you can't close your eyes for whatever reason no worries just try and imagine what I'm about to walk you through as well as you can so you've got your B actor in front of you and he's holding a huge syringe again I'm lazy I'm just going to keep it simple I'm going to have my actor shove the syringe into the crown again and I'm going to have Hellboy jump into the scene and land on top of the syringe again right because the horns have to be at the top my B actor who's Bob Marley he jumps back in fear as he sees Hellboy do this he has no idea what's going on that's me adding emotion into the scene so I don't just have Bob Marley standing there being boring and doing nothing then I see Neo with a look of determination on his face again again I'm lazy I'm not a movie director he's got the same look as he had in the previous scene and he's going to smash this syringe in half so he flies forward as fast as he can and then there's a slow motion moment where Neo smashes through the syringe cuts it in half and you see Hellboy sort of flying looking very scared through the air and there's this moment like what we call a mandarin blueprint a Kodak moment which is great to have for all of your scenes where you can see everyone and everything involved in the movie scene at one moment also representing the keyword so he smashed through so there's half the syringe okay and Hellboy sort of flying through the air like oh and then Neo flying at the bottom through the syringe and then Bob Marley just going what the heck is going on with a lot of shock on his face now while that took a couple of minutes to describe in reality in my mind I could imagine that entire scene in less than 10 seconds and it's very very memorable I involved the environment as I did it I involved emotion I involved senses okay and I could involve senses further by actually being closer to the action and I also did something extra in there which is I added what we call special effects so I made everything slow down this allows your brain to process everything that's going on this is especially useful if you have more than two props if you have three props the way we actually arrange the characters in our course is that you only ever get three props no more than that except for a few very rare situations but if you ever find a bit hard to keep track of what's going on just slow down and then speed it up again there's other cool things you can do you're the cameraman and the director so you can just walk up to what's ever going on you can freeze frame everything and sort of move around it in different angles you can go close up when people are feeling emotion just like they do in the movies right so you can go close up you can go further back you can move it around like Michael Bay you know that Michael Bay style like explosion slash camera moving thing that he does like you can make certain things stand out like the green liquid inside the syringe you can add very clear sound effects it's like another layer of memory you can add to the scene or even theme music you can have certain songs playing that represent aspects of what you're trying to learn you can even add explosions and do that extra violent stuff if you want like I said you really don't have to but if you find it helps you you can go ahead and do that too so if you follow the key principles about this method that I've laid out for you and you add in a few of those special effects from time to time time you'll be able to make super memorable scenes No Matter What props or actors you have or wherever you are what your sets are you'll be able to make memorable movie scenes every single time in literally seconds it takes about 60 seconds at first maybe two minutes but once you get used to this it can literally take 10 five seconds to get this whole thing done in your mind and you can move on to the next character So speaking of which we'll do some extra characters in just a second but what about if for that last one we didn't have Neo we had a cigar what about if we didn't have Hellboy we had I don't know a deer with antlers right well even with those completely different props instantly I can just imagine what those things would do to represent half very quickly and easily based on the properties I know those have so I know what a deer does I'm very familiar with deers my son watches Bambi at least twice a week on his TV days on weekends he watches Bambi constantly that and Paddington too so I have a lot of personal experience with deer and also cigars I know what they do I'll imagine a big cigar that's burning and smoking just so it's doing something fun and interesting so I would imagine for example my actor taking a big puff of this cigar it's a giant cigar and it's burning very hot with lots of smoke and then the deer jumps on top of the syringe and he's actually because he's a deer what is a deer like well deers are very timid and scared and very careful so I'd imagine that the deer is kind of like he wants to stay up there because he's hiding from my actor he doesn't want to come down so the actor wants him to come down and he burns the syringe in half causing it to fall kind of like a tree and then the the deer sort of falls off and runs away right there you go so I just imagine at the top of my head and I'm sure you at home would have probably thought of a different way maybe even a more memorable better way of interacting with those particular props in that particular scene right that's what makes this great again it's all personal to you you make your own associations based on the principles that I've just taught you and that's what makes these scenes extra super memorable because you're drawing off your life experience maybe a maybe a deer to you isn't so timid because you haven't seen Bambi maybe a deer for you is more if you live in the rural Countryside and they're more like attacking your cars and stuff something you have to be careful of when you're driving around so you would have maybe a different scene than I would do you see what I mean so by this point you're probably on your way to mastering this technique already so I'm going to go through a couple more characters quickfire and let's see what you can come up with yourself maybe you can pause the video if you want or you can do it with me real time this next character we're going to learn is Gen it's yet another male actor sorry ladies connected to the letter r with e n and we're gonna have to think of a new set that's connected to the spelling e n for now don't worry about the whole making mnemonics to remember that aspect of it just choose another random Place go ahead and choose another house that you're familiar with I would recommend you leave your childhood home to the null final because that's going to be the most common final you're going to use so to choose a separate thing like one of your family's homes or your friend's home or maybe a workplace or a gym just go ahead and choose that now it doesn't matter don't overthink it and imagine that you're standing in the kitchen of that place or the equivalent just decide on what the equivalent is if it's a gym for example imagine that you're standing inside the entrance when you first walk in at the equivalent of the lobby right for this one we've got two brand new props this stroke on the left is going to be represented by a samurai sword or a samurai warrior and if you want to take that further you could even have specifically Tom Cruise's character from The Last Samurai if you want right I'm just going to go with the samurai sword to keep it simple and on the right this stroke is going to be represented by a banana now we need to represent the idea of person that's what this word means it means person now you might think what how do I how am I supposed to do this well what represents person to you I immediately think of Adam and Eve but you could imagine say a mannequin like one of those mannequins that artists use to draw it represents a person whatever your representation is that's where we're going right so I'm just going to go with the naked man and woman We Believe covering everything that in my mind represents Adam and Eve to my brain right and that's where I'm going to get to so okay we've got a samurai sword and a banana how we're going to get to Adam and Eve or one of those mannequins or whatever else you've imagined well easy you imagine what a samurai sword does and what a banana does what a samurai sword Cuts stuff and a banana opens and it's got stuff inside bananary stuff so I would imagine my R actor which for me has always been Robert Downey Jr or one of his characters like him is Iron Man or whatever it doesn't matter so I'd imagine Robert Downey Jr on the left and then I would imagine on my right a banana just standing there huge banana always make them big by the way it's just easier to remember and to see in your mind's eye and then I would imagine him slicing the banana sort of down the middle and out pops Adam and Eve there you go that's the end of my scene it's perfect and then finally I would just spice it up just a little bit make it more memorable before I continue by making sure that Robert Downey Jr is reacting to what's going on in a very strong way reactions are very powerful so then I would imagine as the sort of samurai sword is stuck in the banana the Adam and Eve come out and and Robert Downey Jr leaves the sword in the banana and just sort of sits back on the floor like in shock like what the heck's going on shock is just a really good one to use so the reason why I kept the sword in the banana is just because that is the position of the two strokes so it's kind of like the left side is on top of the right side so I'd imagine the sort of the Samurai sort of sort of cutting into the banana there so that helps me memorize the stroke order why am I going to that level of detail and especially for such a simple character well this is very important actually because there's a lot of characters that I've look very similar that Learners of Chinese often find very difficult even impossible able to tell the difference between but if you learn using this method where you're very careful about how you position your props you'll never have that problem so for example there's another character that is essentially identical to this one except the components are the other way around it's called Rule which means enter in Chinese so it's the same props but instead of the samurai sword being on top of the banana the bananas on top of the samurai sword so it would be piercing the banana instead of cutting down into it do you see how important that is and it only literally takes an extra millisecond or two to imagine these little details and it makes so much difference to you later on when you go to record the characters so this next character is pronounced Tong and it means from in Chinese and it's made up of two gens and two people that we just learned this is going to be your C actor so it's someone who's male or connected to C in your Ong Place why aren't I experimenting with female or animated or the Wild Card category well that will all become very clear soon for now just go ahead and pick your male actor representing C so it could be a friend called Carl or Calvin or it could be Christian Bale or Clint Eastwood or Conan the Barbarian or Cyclops or Captain Jack Sparrow go ahead and imagine one of those people or pause the video and choose your own set C person once we've done that let's go and get our set and props so just imagine a new place a place that you haven't yet been so so far today you've chosen two different buildings let's choose another one maybe it's another home or another location that you enjoy going to regularly go ahead and choose that and we will be in the hallway or the kitchen or the equivalent so basically inside the entrance of this particular place got our actor got our set our props are going to be two gen so you can use Adam and Eve or it could be a mannequin so what you can do is use the connection that you use to actually learn the original gen character as the prop omgen is used as a component in other characters this is so common so I'm just going to imagine Adam and Eve there with their leaves covering their stuff so I've got two gens right but then I need to have two of them so I've got two sets of Adam and Eve right so I've got four naked people I didn't really think this one through did I got four naked people in my mind with leaves on their bum and the other stuff fine right it's fine every now and then to do that now I'm very glad that we're learning this character in particular because it shows you what is the most challenging type of keyword to imagine a scene around and actually how to make that super super easy so the meaning of this character is from all right so you might be thinking how the heck do I imagine from visually right well to make the intangible tangible or the abstract very concrete very quickly you just think about how that word would be used in reality so how do people use the word from where are you from or what about in a more dramatic way where is that thing coming from or where is that sound or that scary thing from or that annoying thing from I think of a recently actually yesterday I just happened to have watched an office like video on YouTube with uh there was a prank where Jim threw his phone into a vent and it made Andy I think the guy's name is Andy I can't remember I've watched it in years but the guy and it made this guy go absolutely crazy because he could hear the sound but he couldn't figure out where it's coming from hilarious so I just watched that yesterday so I might use something like that like a guy like hearing a noise and not being able to figure out where it's from so that's completely off the top of my head I'm completely based on my personal experience and recent personal experience as well you might have a completely different idea so I've got my two atoms and my two Eaves and I've got the idea about what I want to do I've got the script that I want to sort of lay out here it's really easy I'm going to imagine a completely empty quiet gym so I've got my four naked people my two atoms and my two Eaves all working out and then suddenly I hear this really annoying ringtone so it's this really annoying sound and they all start looking at each other like where is that sound coming from and they look at each other and they start getting really frustrated very quickly we don't have time to hang around we will make this last like five seconds ten seconds so they get angry super quickly and they're throwing all the equipment around trying to find out where that sound is coming from and that's enough right because I can see on their faces what they're doing the gestures the facial expressions that we know as human beings what communicates to me as trying to find something and not being able to that's very obvious it'll probably take me two pages to explain what's going on but one millisecond just to look at their face and go Ah that's what's going on and I could even go and help them find it I could involve myself in the scene as well try and help them find this ringtone and maybe at the end we could actually find it if you want so that's absolutely fine that's more than enough to learn this character pretty much forever so there you go guys that is the enhanced version of the Maryland method or as we like to call it the Hands Up movie method there is a lot more to this method but I don't want to make this video like two hours long but if you would like to learn the method in its entirety you can click Below on one of the links and you'll be able to access our course the mandrel blueprint method where you can actually get to 3050 characters essentially native level understanding past the hsk 9 learn like 12 000 words that's the character method taken care of but you still need a list of characters and that brings me back to the order which I mentioned a couple of times in this video right there was a reason why we went Gan then ban then Jen then Tong these characters and components build upon each other in a logical way and that's what I said earlier about the heisig method which I really liked is the way they arranged the characters by component the major downside though the way they did it was they did it over 3000 characters so they took the whole 3000 and then they chunked them up by component instead of really focusing on frequency that could be applied for beginners intermediate and advanced levels so what I mean is you'd have to wait until like more than 2 000 characters in to learn the character for na which means that in Chinese so to combat this Phil and I made our own order which is the backbone of the entire Mandarin blueprint curriculum this curriculum first focuses on getting you from zero to the most common 600 characters which unlocks 1 000 common words and we also give you comprehensible sentences for every single usage of every single one of these words throughout as well as a bunch of graded reading content which you unlock as your level gets good enough so that is the foundation course that'll get you to 600 characters then once you're done with that you move on to the intermediate course which will get you to 1500 characters 94 of The Language by coverage and hsk 6 the new one then once you're done with that you move on to the Upper Intermediate and advanced course and get all the way to 3050 characters and an hsk 9 pass now the cool thing about this of course is that you not only learn characters and components you're also unlocking words as you go and they're all based on frequency and you'll see all these words in comprehensible context both sentences and long form content as you go through so you could take what you've learned today and just apply it to your own order of characters if you're going to go that route I highly recommend you just go and buy the heising book you should be able to get through those characters very quickly applying what you've learned here I'd say around about 150 to 200 hours worth of time including reviews for your flashcards you should be able to find somewhere a shared Anki deck for the heisig method so you can go and choose your actors choose your sets and then go get the books and go get that Anki deck and just get to work and get all the way to 3000 as quickly as you possibly can but if you would like what is in our opinion the absolute fastest most efficient most fun and effective way go ahead and check out the link in the description below and you can start the Mandarin blueprint method once you've got that course you can just follow our videos and get to pretty much any level of Chinese you wish so I want you to congratulate yourself feel very happy right now so if you're learning Chinese you've just discovered that the hardest part about the entire language is now pretty much the easiest and the most fun the next step in this process after you've learned how to learn characters is learning how to learn words because you need a lot of words if you want to get to a high level of fluency one day check out this video right here where I walk you through our most effect active mnemonic techniques for mastering any Chinese word in just a few seconds thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next one bye

Channel: Mandarin Blueprint

Views: 130,484

Keywords: How to learn Chinese, How to Learn Mandarin, How to Learn Chinese Language, Chinese Video Lesson, Chinese online course, chinese course, learn chinese fast, learn chinese characters for beginners, chinese characters explained, chinese characters, learn chinese, language learning, mandarin chinese

Id: SUVHMEUld4I

Length: 46min 51sec (2811 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 06 2023